Nikole Hannah-Jones


Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones is an American investigative journalist known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. In April 2015, she became a staff writer for The New York Times, where she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020.

Early life

Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is of Czech and English descent. Hannah-Jones is the second of three sisters. In 1947, when her father was two years old, his family moved north to Iowa from Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, as did many other African-American families.
Hannah-Jones and her sister attended almost all-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.
Hannah-Jones has a bachelor's degree in History and African-American Studies from the University of Notre Dame, which she received in 1998.
In November 1995, while a Sophomore at Notre Dame, Hannah-Jones penned a Letter to the Editor criticizing Fred Kelly's Observer article entitled "God Bless Columbus". She claimed "The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world." and that "Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different Hitler".
She graduated from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media with a master's degree in 2003, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.

Career

In 2003, Hannah-Jones began her career covering the education beat, 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 she covered an enterprise assignment that included feature work, then the demographics beat, and then the government & census beats.
In 2007, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots, Hannah-Jones wrote about its impact on the community for 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 Raul 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 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.

New York Times

In 2015, Hannah-Jones became a staff reporter for The New York Times.
Hannah-Jones wrote the opening essay for the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began August 14, 2019... "aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."
Hannah-Jones has written about topics such as racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation in American schools and housing discrimination, and has spoken about these issues on national public radio broadcasts.
She writes to discover and expose the systemic and institutional racism perpetuated by official laws and acts.
Her stories have been quoted in numerous other publications as being particularly important regarding race relations. 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 magazine praised her report on school resegregation, which showed how educational inequality may have been a factor in the unfortunate death of Brown.
Hannah-Jones is a 2017 Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she is working on a book on school segregation. The book, The Problem We All Live With, is due out in June 2020 from Chris Jackson's One World imprint at Random House.
Hannah-Jones is a 2017 award winner of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award."

1619 Project

In 2019, Hannah-Jones launched the New York Times' 1619 Project with the goal of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States and timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia. The project featured contributions by the paper's writers, including essays on the history of different aspects of contemporary American life which the authors believe have "roots in slavery and its aftermath." It also includes poems, short fiction, and a photo essay. Originally conceived of as a special issue for August 20, 2019, it was soon turned into a full-fledged project, including a special broadsheet section in the newspaper, live events, and a multi-episode podcast series.
In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her work on The 1619 Project. However, her paper has been criticized by historians like Gordon S. Wood or Leslie M. Harris for asserting without evidence 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 has been corrected in March 2020 and now reads "for some of the colonists".

Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting

In early 2015, Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with Ron Nixon, Corey Johnson, and Topher Sanders, began dreaming of creating the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. This organization was launched in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2016, with the purpose of promoting investigative journalism, which is the least common type of reporting. Following in the footsteps of Ida B. Wells, this society encourages minority journalists to expose injustices perpetuated by the government and defend people who are susceptible to being taken advantage of. This organization was created with much support from the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Controversy

Fireworks conspiracy

In June 2020, Hannah-Jones received criticism for quote-tweeting a Twitter thread that detailed a widely-circulated conspiracy theory claiming that the noticeable uptick in firework shows in Brooklyn and Queens were part of "a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces". Hannah-Jones later deleted the quote-tweet and apologized in an interview with the National Review, stating that the tweet was "an irresponsible use of my platform and beneath my own standards, which is why I deleted ".

''Modern Savagery'' letter

On June 25, 2020, the conservative website The Federalist published a letter that Hannah-Jones had submitted to The Observer, Notre Dame's student newspaper, in 1995. In the letter, Hannah-Jones calls the "white race" the "biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world," and argues that "Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different then Hitler." The letter also invokes the fringe theory that the Olmecs of ancient Mesoamerica were of partially African origin.

Personal life

Hannah-Jones lives in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, and their daughter.

Awards

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