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About Nikole Hannah-Jones
American investigative journalist Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones was born on April 9, 1976, and is well-known for her coverage of civil rights issues in the United States.
Hannah-Jones has dedicated her career to examining racial injustice and inequality. As a result of her work, she has received several honors, including the “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Fellowship.
In April 2015, she started working as a staff writer at The New York Times. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2020, her work on The 1619 Project earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
Quick Facts:
- Birth Name: Nikole Hannah-Jones
- Birth Date: 9 April 1976
- Birth Place:Waterloo, Iowa, United States
- Gender: Female
- Career: American journalist
- Most Known For: She is renowned for her reporting on American civil rights. She started working as a staff writer for The New York Times in April 2015. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for her contributions to The 1619 Project.
Early Life:
Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to African-American father Milton Hannah and white mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is descended from both the Czech and English countries. The second of their three daughters is Hannah-Jones. Her upbringing was Catholic.
As part of a voluntary desegregation busing scheme, Hannah-Jones and her sister attended schools with a large white student body. She graduated from Waterloo West High School in 1994 after attending and contributing to the school newspaper.
Hannah-Jones studied history and African-American studies at the University of Notre Dame after graduating from high school, where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1998. In 2003, she received her master’s degree from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.
Career:
Hannah-Jones started her career in 2003 as a reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, covering education, including the largely African-American Durham Public Schools. She worked there for three years.
Hannah-Jones relocated to Portland, Oregon in 2006, and spent the next six years as a writer for The Oregonian. Her jobs during this period included government and census beats, followed by feature work and demography.
Hannah-Jones wrote in 2007 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots in 1965 on the effects of the Kerner Commission, also known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, on the neighborhood.
Hannah-Jones traveled to Cuba in 2008 and 2009 as a recipient of a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies, where she studied Raul Castro’s educational system and universal healthcare.
In 2011, she started working for the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, based in New York City, where she covered civil rights, carried out in-depth investigative reporting on the non-enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities, and resumed her investigation on redlining that she had begun in Oregon. Additionally, Hannah-Jones lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the outcome of Brown v. Board of Education had less impact.
In 2012, Hannah Jones was awarded the Gannett Foundation Innovation in Watchdog Journalism Award and in 2013, the Sidney Award and Columbia University, Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ron Nixon, Corey Johnson, and Topher Sanders started dreaming about establishing the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting at the beginning of 2015. This organization was founded in 2016 with the intention of advancing investigative journalism—the least common kind of reporting—in Memphis, Tennessee.
New York Times
Hannah-Jones joined The New York Times as a staff reporter in 2015. Hannah-Jones has written and spoken on national public radio programs about issues including housing discrimination, racial segregation, and the desegregation and resegregation of American schools.
Her research on racial disparities has received a lot of attention and is frequently quoted. One of the “most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state” of Missouri, Hannah-Jones reported on the school district where Michael Brown, a teenager, had been shot. Slate reviewer Laura Moser commended her study on school resegregation, which demonstrated how educational disparity might have played a role in Brown’s demise.
Hannah-Jones worked on a book about school segregation while she was an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation in 2017. The Problem We All Live With, a book, was scheduled to release in June 2020 under the Random House One World label. Hannah-Jones was awarded a MacArthur Foundation scholarship in 2017.
Project 1619
With the goal of transforming public perception of slavery in the United States, Hannah-Jones initiated a project in 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia. Hannah-Jones wrote a number of pieces for The New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project special issue.
Hannah-Jones’ work on the 1619 Project earned her a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020. The 1619 Project was recognized as one of the top ten journalism achievements of the 2010–2019 decade by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
In 2021, Hannah-Jones was chosen to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The University of North Carolina announced in April 2021 that Hannah-Jones will become the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media starting in July 2021. Hannah-Jones turned down the job offer from North Carolina in favor of a tenure-track role at Howard University, where she will hold the first-ever Knight Chair in Race and Journalism.
Inspired by the civil rights movement’s 1960s Freedom Schools, Hannah-Jones and educator Sheritta Stokes opened the 1619 Freedom School in Waterloo, Iowa, in January 2022. Hannah-Jones received the Social Justice Impact Award in 2022 and was a nominee for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Nonfiction. In 2023, Hannah Jones baged the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series for The 1619 Project. On March 2024, Hannah-Jones published an essay in the Time magazine on How a 50-year campaign has undermined the progress of the civil rights movement.
Personal Life:
Although Nikole and Faraji Hannah-Jones would rather keep their romance quiet, the specifics of how they first met and fell in love are still unknown but they have been together for nearly 20 years. Their daughter Nayja, was born in April 2010. They reside in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
