Who is Elijah Pittman?

Introduction

Elijah Pittman is a multimedia journalist reporting from the perspective of the wretched of the earth. For Elijah, the wretched of the earth refers to the people who have historically been the most exploited by the dominant forces of society — African people. Elijah primarily uses written journalism, supported by photography and djing, to report and connect the experiences of African people both historically and currently. Elijah’s work is guided and underscored by his late best friend, Marquay James, who fundamentally reoriented Elijah’s worldview during their brotherhood since 2020.

Journalism

Elijah is currently an investigative reporting fellow at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, where he has spent the last three years working on projects related to the African-descendant experience. His primary project with IRW has been focused on government accountability for Black communities in Baltimore City with regard to lead poisoning.

In 2025 a project called “Forty Acres and a Lie,” that Elijah contributed to for Mother Jones, became a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in the explanatory reporting category. Throughout 2025 Elijah worked at the Investigative Reporting Workshop to expand the reporting of his project, as new information had been revealed from the city.

In 2024, Elijah was a reporting fellow with Maryland Matters and a fellow at the Investigative Reporting Workshop where he worked under a pulitzer prize winning journalist.

At Maryland Matters he covered state and local politics, particularly as they related to the African experience. Elijah broke a story on how Baltimore’s Fixed Price Housing Program, which city leaders lauded as an opportunity to restore homeownership to Black Baltimore residents, was denying most Baltimore residents and instead approving outside developers to buy city-owned lots of land in Black neighborhoods. Additionally, Elijah covered the Amtrak tunnel being built under Black neighborhoods in West Baltimore, the commodification of Juneteenth, and Baltimore City’s successes in winning lawsuits against companies deemed responsible for their role in the city’s opioid crisis.

In 2023 Elijah wrote for the Morgan State Spokesman, worked on the print team of the NABJ student projects in Birmingham Alabama, and he started at the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

For the NABJ monitor, Elijah covered both misinformation generated by social media outlets that target Black consumers and the reasoning behind the lack of radical politics at HBCUs. For the convention itself, Elijah covered the NABJ and NAHJ split, the election of NABJ president Ken Lemon, and the NABJ board business meeting.

Elijah originally broke ground in his journalism path in 2022 when he arrived at Morgan State University, where he worked for The Spokesman, the school’s student-run newspaper. There, Elijah covered Morgan State’s placement of metal detectors in on-campus dormitories, the 1991 campus student protest, and Morgan State’s President’s summer trip to Israel. Before Morgan State, Elijah served as both a writer and, later, the co-editor-in-chief of his high school’s yearbook, the Lance.