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crew · Actor

1976-04-09 · United States · Female

4 series in the catalog

Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist known for her coverage of racial discrimination in American schools and for her work on The 1619 Project, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Hannah-Jones has been a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine since 2015 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.

Early life and education

Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is white and of Czech and English descent. Hannah-Jones is the second of their three daughters. She was raised Catholic.

Hannah-Jones and her sister attended predominantly white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She attended Waterloo West High School, where she wrote for the high-school newspaper and graduated in 1994.

After high school, Hannah-Jones attended the University of Notre Dame, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and African-American studies in 1998.

In 1995, in response to an article published in the Notre Dame student newspaper that called American Indians "savages", Hannah-Jones replied with a letter to the editor titled "Modern Savagery." She stated: "I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world....The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil."

In 2003, she graduated with a master's degree from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.

Career

In 2003, Hannah-Jones began her career covering education, which included the predominantly African-American Durham Public Schools, for the Raleigh News & Observer, a position she held for three years.

In 2006, Hannah-Jones moved to Portland, Oregon, where she wrote for The Oregonian for six years. During this time, her assignments included feature work, demographics, and then government and census beats.

In 2007, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots, Hannah-Jones wrote about the impact on the community of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission.

From 2008 to 2009, Hannah-Jones received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies which enabled her to travel to Cuba to study universal healthcare and Cuba's educational system under Raúl Castro.

In 2011, she joined the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which is based in New York City, where she covered civil rights and continued research she had started in Oregon on redlining and in-depth investigative reporting on the lack of enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities. Hannah-Jones also spent time in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the decision in Brown v. Board of Education had little effect.

In 2021, Hannah-Jones was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2023, Hannah-Jones was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Chicago State University at its 370th commencement ceremony.

The New York Times Magazine

In 2015, Hannah-Jones became a staff reporter for The New York Times Magazine. She has written about topics such as racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation in American schools, and housing discrimination. Her work often focuses on institutional racism.

Her work on racial inequalities has been particularly influential and is cited widely. Hannah-Jones reported on the school district where teenager Michael Brown had been shot, one of the "most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state" of Missouri. Reviewer Laura Moser of Slate praised her report on school resegregation, which showed how educational inequality may have been a factor in the death of Brown.

Hannah-Jones was a 2017 Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation and a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The award cited her "chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform."

Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting

In 2016, Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with Ron Nixon, Corey Johnson, and Topher Sanders, launched the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, in Memphis, Tennessee, to promote investigative journalism. The organization places "emerging journalists from historically underrepresented communities" into paid internships at news organizations and offers workshops and trainings.

1619 Project

In August 2019, Hannah-Jones launched The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine "to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [the] national narrative." It was timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia. The project featured essays by a combination of staff writers and academics including Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, Harvard-trained lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, and SUNY historian Anne Bailey. In the opening essay, Hannah-Jones wrote: "No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed." The project also included poems, short fiction, and a photo essay. Originally conceived of as a single special issue, its scope expanded to include a special broadsheet section in the newspaper, live events, and a multi-episode podcast series.

The project has become a leading subject of the American history wars, receiving criticism from historians, both from the political left and the right, who question its historical accuracy. Historians Gordon S. Wood and Leslie M. Harris criticized the project's assertion that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." The article was "clarified" in March 2020 to read "for some of the colonists". The project initially argued "that the country's true birth date" was in August 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans rather than in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Speaking to New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens, Hannah-Jones clarified that this was "always a metaphoric argument."

In 2020, Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the 1619 Project. The award cited her "sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America's story, prompting public conversation about the nation's founding and evolution." New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named the 1619 Project as one of the 10 greatest works of journalism in the decade from 2010 to 2019. In 2022, Hannah-Jones was nominated at the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction and was recognized with the Social Justice Impact Award.

In January 2022, Hannah-Jones and teacher Sheritta Stokes launched the 1619 Freedom School in Waterloo, Iowa "to serve students whose standardized reading scores show they are the most academically behind." The program "teaches literacy through materials and books that center Black American history and culture" via a four-day-a-week, two-hour literacy enrichment for the Waterloo school district for grade-school students.

Howard University

In 2021, Hannah-Jones joined Howard University as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism. The Knight Foundation endowed the chair with $500,000…