Hannah-Jones, Nikole

Impact on the world

Published to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans’ arrival in Virginia, The 1619 Project reframed mainstream understanding of American history around slavery and Black Americans’ contributions, sparking both wide adoption in classrooms nationwide and sustained criticism from historians over some of its specific historical claims, which the Times later clarified. Hannah-Jones won a 2017 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for her earlier reporting on school segregation, co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting in 2016 to increase the number of journalists of color, and in 2021 declined a tenure offer from the University of North Carolina after a donor-influenced controversy, instead becoming the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy and brought $20 million in philanthropic support to the historically Black institution.

Life & background

Born April 9, 1976, in Waterloo, Iowa, to a Black father who served in the military and a white mother who worked as a state probation officer, Hannah-Jones earned a B.A. 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, where she later became the center of the tenure controversy. She joined The New York Times as a staff writer in 2015 after reporting on housing and school segregation for outlets including ProPublica, launched The 1619 Project in August 2019, and has since won the Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, and the National Magazine Award three times; she lives in Brooklyn and continues to write for The New York Times Magazine while teaching at Howard University.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; The Pulitzer Prizes; Howard University