Nikole Hannah-Jones

Hannah-Jones produced a series of articles for a special issue of The New York Times Magazine titled The 1619 Project.

Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist, known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States.

She attended Waterloo West High School, where she wrote for the high-school newspaper and graduated in 1994.

In 1995, in response to an article published in the Notre Dame student newspaper that called American Indians "savages", Hannah-Jones replied with an article 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."

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

In January 2022, Hannah-Jones and teacher Sheritta Stokes launched the 1619 Freedom School in Waterloo Iowa, inspired by the 1960s Freedom Schools of the civil-rights movement.

The program is a five-day-a-week, two-hour literacy enrichment for the Waterloo school district for grade-school students.

She joined The New York Times as a staff writer in April 2015, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for her work on The 1619 Project.

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.

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.

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 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, where she worked on a book on school segregation.

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."

In 2019, Hannah-Jones launched a project to fundamentally change the way slavery in the United States was viewed, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia.

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.

The book, The Problem We All Live With, was due out in June 2020 from Chris Jackson's One World imprint at Random House.

In 2020, Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the 1619 Project.