Nikole Hannah-Jones

Early life and education

Nikole Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, as the middle of three daughters. Her father, Milton Hannah, is Black and African-American, while her mother, Cheryl A. Novotny, is white with Czech and English roots. She was raised in the Catholic faith. Through a voluntary desegregation busing program, she and her sister attended mostly white schools.

At Waterloo West High School, she worked on the student newspaper and graduated in 1994. She went on to the University of Notre Dame, earning a bachelor’s degree in history and African-American studies in 1998. While there, in 1995, she wrote a letter to the editor titled “Modern Savagery” after a campus newspaper piece described American Indians as “savages.” In that letter, she called the white race “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world.”

She later earned a master’s degree in 2003 from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow. On May 18, 2023, Chicago State University granted her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at its 370th commencement.

Career

Hannah-Jones began her career in 2003 covering education, including the predominantly African-American Durham Public Schools, for the Raleigh News & Observer, a position she held for three years. In 2006, she moved to Portland, Oregon, to write for The Oregonian for six years, where her assignments included feature work, demographics, and government and census beats. In 2007, she wrote about the impact of the Kerner Commission on the community to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots.

From 2008 to 2009, a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies allowed her to travel to Cuba to study universal healthcare and Cuba's educational system under Raúl Castro. In 2011, she joined ProPublica in New York City, covering civil rights and continuing research on redlining and the lack of enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities; she also spent time in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Brown v. Board of Education had little effect.

She became a staff reporter for The New York Times in 2015. She has written about racial segregation, desegregation, resegregation in schools, and housing discrimination, and has spoken on national public radio.

Her work on racial inequalities is widely cited; she reported on the school district where Michael Brown had been shot, described as one of the "most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state" of Missouri. In January 2022, she and teacher Sheritta Stokes launched the 1619 Freedom School in Waterloo, Iowa, a literacy enrichment program for grade-school students. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Controversies and criticism

Five historians—Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood—wrote to The New York Times Magazine requesting corrections to the 1619 Project, including for Hannah-Jones's assertions on the American Revolution and on Lincoln. Historian Leslie M. Harris, who was consulted for the Project, wrote in Politico that she had warned the idea that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery was inaccurate. In the May 2022 issue of Reason, reporter Phillip W. Magness criticized the 1619 Project as "junk history."

William Simons wrote that Hannah-Jones's prescription for overcoming slavery's legacy—reparations for descendants of slaves, national health care, and other social welfare programs—provides no cost analysis, details, or assessment of the political climate. In June 2020, Hannah-Jones apologized for retweeting a conspiracy theory that fireworks were being set off by "government agents" to dampen the Black Lives Matter movement. She questioned the veracity of a 2024 essay in The Atlantic by a former New York Times editor who said he had been chastised by human resources for eating at Chick-fil-A; The Atlantic asserted the story was fact-checked and confirmed with multiple Times employees, and journalists Robby Soave, Erik Wemple, and Jonathan Chait supported the magazine.

Publications

Hannah-Jones's publications include Fields of Lost Dreams: How Race and Racism Have Contributed to the Overrepresentation of Blacks in the Iowa Prison System (2003), Living Apart (2012), Segregation Now: Investigating America's Racial Divide (2014), The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery (2018), The 1619 Project: New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019 (2019), The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021), and The 1619 Project – Born on the Water (2021).