Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine about racial inequality. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for commentary for her essay in “The 1619 Project,” a special edition of the magazine that traces the influence of slavery in the United States.
“At 43, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship,” she wrote. “Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally ‘free’ for just 50.”
The landmark project, which Hannah-Jones conceived of and managed, was originally published on Aug. 18, 2019, 400 years to the day after the first ship containing more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in port near Point Comfort, Virginia.
From that starting point, the issue examines in commentary, essays, short fiction, and poetry the ongoing legacy of slavery in shaping American history and contemporary life. The project also includes a history of slavery from the Smithsonian Museum; an audio series by “The Daily,” The New York Times podcast; and a series of resource materials from the Pulitzer Center for teachers to incorporate “The 1619 Project” in their classes.
Her Pulitzer Prize-winning essay, “Our Democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” sets the tone for the entire series. It’s the culmination of the work Hannah-Jones says she was called to do from the minute she started writing.
Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1976. Her mother is white and her father was Black; his family moved to Waterloo from a sharecropping farm in the Mississippi Delta because his mother, Nikole’s grandmother, refused to have her children grow up picking cotton as her family had for generations.
Hannah-Jones and her family lived in a Black segregated neighborhood, and she and her sisters attended segregated public schools. She was bused to a white high school, however, and she noticed right away that the school newspaper never wrote stories about Black students. She joined the staff and began writing stories she wanted to read.
“That was when I first understood the power of being able to tell your own stories and not allow someone else to frame how you are seen to the world,” she told an audience of journalists in 2017.
Hannah-Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in history and African American Studies from the University of Notre Dame, and a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She spent several years as an investigative journalist in Raleigh, NC and Portland, Oregon before joining ProPublica in New York, where she covered civil rights. She is also a contributor to National Public Radio.
Her reporting on school and housing segregation, and the failure of the federal government to enforce civil rights law, has earned several awards. In 2017, she received a National Magazine Award for “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” an article she wrote for The New York Times Magazine about her decision to send her daughter to a low-income public school.
She received a George Polk Award and a Peabody Award for a series of articles she wrote after visiting the school district from which Michael Brown graduated, and an investigative series she wrote on school segregation in the South won the Hechinger prize for national education reporting.
In 2017 Hannah-Jones was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and a year later she was awarded the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In addition to winning a Pulitzer for “The 1619 Project,” she also received a Polk Special Award.
She is co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, named for the pioneering Black journalist, suffragist and women’s rights activist who cofounded the NAACP, which is housed at the University of North Carolina. In 2019, the school gave her its Distinguished Alumna Award.
The investigative reporting Hannah-Jones excels at is deeply historic, something she says is essential when she writes stories about ideas and systems that are so entrenched that people approach a story thinking they already know it — and aren’t open to any other interpretation.
“If we want people to care about things that seem to be fixed in our country, we have to figure out a way to get them to see the story in a different way,” she said in 2017. “It’s our job to help them understand they may not actually understand the story at all.
“Our work has to humanize the issues we’re reporting on.”
Editor’s note: “The 1619 Project” is currently in the cross-hairs of President Trump and others who challenge its premise that American history is incomplete without a full accounting for the foundational legacy of slavery. Calling the teaching of systemic racism in schools “a twisted web of lies,” the administration has threatened to ban books and other material, including “The 1619 Project,” from public schools. Yesterday the White House announced the creation of its own curriculum, The 1776 Commission, to promote “patriotic education”. Whatever that is.
Top photo: Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo