One of Central Piedmont’s most famous alumni is photographer John White. He graduated from Central Piedmont in 1966 with an applied sciences degree and a focus in art-photography. Throughout his career, John White went on to receive numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for his work as a photographer at the Chicago Sun-Times, which documented life of African-American communities in Chicago’s Southside neighborhood. John White was the first (and perhaps the only) community college graduate in history to win a Pulitzer Prize.
To celebrate this momentous achievement, Central Piedmont invited John White to the campus, where he was honored with the Richard Hagemeyer Educational Advancement Award and Mayor John Belk declared June 11, 1982 as “John White Day.”