FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — George Mason is honoring one of its former professors whose career stretched beyond academia into journalism and civil rights.

The school is dedicating a plaza Thursday in the Johnson Center on its flagship Fairfax campus to Roger Wilkins, who died earlier this year at age 85.

Wilkins won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 along with Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoonist Herbert Block for coverage of the Watergate scandal. Wilkins was working as an editorial writer at the time.

He championed civil rights as an assistant attorney general in the Lyndon Johnson administration.

Wilkins served as a professor of history and American culture at Mason from 1986 until his retirement in 2007.