Ray Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked as a special assistant for press affairs in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, has died. He was 89.

Jenkins’ son Mark Jenkins says his father died Thursday at his home in Baltimore from congestive heart failure.

Ray Jenkins was part of the reporting team at Georgia’s Columbus Ledger that won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism for covering corruption in nearby Phenix City, Alabama.

He served as an editor of the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal and covered Southern politics and the civil rights movement before joining Carter’s administration in 1979.

Jenkins retired after being the editorial page editor of The Evening Sun in Baltimore from 1981 to 1991.

He is survived by his wife and three children.