Cheryl W. Thompson
Cheryl W. Thompson is an investigative correspondent for NPR.
Prior to joining NPR in January 2019, she spent 22 years at The Washington Post, where she wrote extensively about law enforcement, political corruption and guns, and was a White House correspondent during Barack Obama's first term. Her investigative series that traced the guns used to kill more than 500 police officers in the U.S. earned her an Emmy, a National Headliner, an IRE, a White House News Photographers Association and other awards. In 2015, her reporting found that nearly one person a week died in the U.S. after being Tasered by police. The story was part of a year-long series on police shootings in the U.S. that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 2017, her examination of Howard University Hospital revealed myriad problems with the storied facility, including that it had the highest rate of death lawsuits per bed than the five other D.C. hospitals. Her project published in May 2018 investigated the unsolved serial murders of six black girls in the nation's capital nearly 50 years ago, and won an SPJ DC award for magazine feature writing. She has won numerous other awards, including two Salute to Excellence Awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, and was named NABJ's Educator of the Year in 2017. She was part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 for Sept. 11.
Thompson is a member of NABJ, teaches investigative reporting as an associate professor at George Washington University and serves as board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a 6,100-member organization whose mission is to improve the quality of investigative journalism.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks to Cheryl W. Thompson about her book, "Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen," which chronicles Black World War II pilots who were lost in combat.
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The incident, which was caught on video, marks the second deadly shooting by federal officers in Minneapolis in less than a month. -
Nancy Leftenant-Colon, who became the first Black nurse in the U.S. Army Air Corps after President Harry S. Truman desegregated it in 1948, has died at age 104. -
More than 250 people have died since 2013 when trenches they were working in caved in. In most cases, the employers failed to follow basic government regulations for making trenches safe. -
About 100 prosecutors across Ohio violated standards meant to protect a defendant's civil rights in criminal trials, an investigation by NPR and its reporting partners found. Some did so repeatedly. -
About 100 prosecutors across Ohio violated standards meant to protect a defendant's civil rights in criminal trials, an investigation by NPR and its reporting partners found. Some did so repeatedly.
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A thumbnail-size "switch" turns a gun from semi-automatic to automatic. Authorities see a correlation between an uptick in mass shootings and the rise of switch-equipped guns and extended magazines. -
Many of the actors who star alongside Adam Sandler in the new basketball movie Hustle are real NBA athletes. NPR's Cheryl W. Thompson talks with director Jeremiah Zagar about the film. -
Racial covenants made it illegal for Black people to live in white neighborhoods. Now they're illegal, but you might still have one on your home's deed. And they're hard to remove. -
Heat has killed hundreds of workers in the U.S., many in construction or agriculture, an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Federal standards might have prevented them.
