Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) 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." In 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on "The 1619 Project".
Early life.
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 three sisters. In 1947 Hannah-Jones' father, at the age of two, along with his mother and older brother, left Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, heading north by train to Iowa, as did many other African-American families, determined to avoid a life of "picking cotton in the feudal society that was the Mississippi Delta".
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 earned a bachelor's degree in History and African-American Studies from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1998. 
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.
Hannah-Jones was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
In April 2021, the University of North Carolina announced Hannah-Jones would join the Hussman School of Journalism and Media in July 2021 as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, typically a tenured position. Following criticism, particularly from conservative groups who expressed disagreement with the 1619 Project and questioned Hannah-Jones's credentials, the University Board of Trustees made the unprecedented decision not to follow the tenure committee's recommendation to approve her application for tenure. The university announced they would instead offer a fixed five-year contract. The decision faced backlash from faculty members at the Journalism school, more than 40 of whom signed a statement claiming that UNC "unfairly moves the goal posts" by not offering her tenure. The last two people to be given this position were granted tenure upon their appointment.
"The New York Times".
In 2015, Hannah-Jones became a staff reporter for "The New York Times."
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 that she says are perpetuated by official laws and acts.
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 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 was a 2017 Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she worked 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 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.”
1619 Project.
In 2019, Hannah-Jones launched a project to re-examine the legacy of slavery in the United States, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia. Hannah-Jones produced a series of articles for a special issue of "The New York Times Magazine" titled The 1619 Project. The ongoing initiative began August 14, 2019 and "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."
 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 special issue, 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, 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.” Her paper was criticized by historians Gordon S. Wood and Leslie M. Harris, specifically for asserting 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". There was also debate around whether the project suggested the nation was founded in 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 said the suggestion of considering 1619 as a jumping-off point for interpreting US history had always been so self-evidently metaphorical that it went without saying.
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.
Controversies and criticism.
Criticism of the 1619 Project.
Five historians wrote to the New York Times Magazine to ask the creators of its 1619 Project to issue corrections, including for Hannah-Jones's assertions on the American Revolution and on Lincoln. The correction request was signed by Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James M. McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon S. Wood of Brown University.
Alleged doxxing of reporter.
A Washington Free Beacon reporter highlighted a tweet from Hannah-Jones from May 2016 in which she quoted someone using the N-word. After being asked for comment, Hannah-Jones posted the reporter's inquiry, which contained his work phone number, on Twitter.
When someone noted that she had posted his phone number, Hannah-Jones did not immediately delete her tweet.
In an interview with Slate, Hannah-Jones said, "I didn’t realize I was tweeting out his phone number, and when someone mentioned it, I should have deleted it. So absolutely. I did not intend to do that, and I wish that I hadn’t."
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.
Personal life.
Hannah-Jones lives in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, and their daughter.