Hill, Jemele
1975-present · Contribution: 2006-present
Built a national platform combining sports journalism with outspoken political commentary, most notably a 2017 Twitter thread calling President Trump a “white supremacist” that triggered a White House response and reshaped debate over athletes' and journalists' use of social media
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
After twelve years at ESPN, including co-anchoring the network's marquee SC6 SportsCenter alongside Michael Smith, Hill's September 2017 tweets criticizing President Trump drew a rare public rebuke from the White House press secretary, who called her comments “a fireable offense” — a moment widely analyzed as an early test case for how far sports and media figures could use personal social media accounts for political speech without corporate reprisal. She left ESPN for The Atlantic in 2018, launched the Spotify podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered in 2019, and co-founded the production company Lodge Freeway Media, producing the ESPN Colin Kaepernick documentary; she won a 2017 Emmy for the ABC News special The President and the People and was named National Association of Black Journalists' 2018 Journalist of the Year.
Life & background
Born Jemele Juanita Hill on December 21, 1975, in Detroit, Michigan, and raised primarily by her single mother amid family struggles with addiction, Hill graduated from Mumford High School in 1993 and Michigan State University in 1997 with a journalism degree. She began her career as a sportswriter at the Raleigh News & Observer, then the Detroit Free Press and Orlando Sentinel, before joining ESPN as a national columnist in 2006, rising to co-host Numbers Never Lie (later His & Hers) with Michael Smith and eventually SC6. She published the memoir Uphill in 2022, married Ian Wallace in 2019, and continues to host multiple podcasts including Spolitics for iHeartPodcasts.
Sources
- National Press Foundation; Springfield College
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