Nikole Hannah-Jones

In 2015, Hannah-Jones became a staff reporter for The New York Times.[15]

Hannah-Jones has written about topics such as racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation in American schools[16][17] and housing discrimination, and has spoken about these issues on national public radio broadcasts.[18][19]

She writes to discover and expose the systemic and institutional racism that she says are perpetuated by official laws and acts.[20]

Her work on racial inequalities has been particularly influential and is cited widely.[21] Hannah-Jones reported on the school district where teenager Michael Brown had been shot, one of the "most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state" of Missouri.[22][23] Reviewer Laura Moser of Slate magazine praised her report on school resegregation, which showed how educational inequality may have been a factor in the unfortunate death of Brown.[24]

Hannah-Jones was a 2017 Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation,[25] where she worked on a book on school segregation.[26] The book, The Problem We All Live With, is due out in June 2020 from Chris Jackson's One World imprint at Random House.[27]

Hannah-Jones is a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship.[28] The award cited her “ Chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform.”[29]

In 2019, Hannah-Jones launched a project to re-examine the legacy of slavery in the United States, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia.[30] Hannah-Jones produced a series of articles for a special issue of The New York Times Magazine titled The 1619 Project.[31] The ongoing initiative began August 14, 2019 and "aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative." [32] The project featured essays by a combination of staff writers and academics including Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, Harvard-trained lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, and SUNY historian Anne Bailey. In the opening essay, Hannah-Jones wrote "No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed." The project also included poems, short fiction, and a photo essay. Originally conceived of as a special issue, it was soon turned into a full-fledged project, including a special broadsheet section in the newspaper, live events, and a multi-episode podcast series.

In 2020, Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the 1619 Project.[33] The award cited her “sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.”[34] Her paper was criticized by historians Gordon S. Wood and Leslie M. Harris, specifically for asserting that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."[35][36][37] The article was “clarified” in March 2020 to read "for some of the colonists".[38] There was also debate around whether the project suggested the nation was founded in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans rather than in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence.[39][40][41] Speaking to New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens, Hannah-Jones said the suggestion of considering 1619 as a jumping-off point for interpreting US history had always been so self-evidently metaphorical that it went without saying.[42]

New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named the 1619 Project as one of the 10 greatest works of journalism in the decade from 2010 to 2019.[43]

In the fall of 2019 the World Socialist Web Site interviewed four leading historians who had major problems with the 1619 Project. This included the leading historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Brown University’s Gordon Wood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the American Revolution, “couldn’t believe” that Hannah-Jones had argued that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery.[44] Princeton’s James McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for work on the Civil War, stated that he was “disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.” [45]

On October 6, 2020, twenty-one scholars from around the United States signed a letter prepared by the National Association of Scholars asking that Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize be rescinded. The letter alleged, among other things, factual mistakes, Hannah-Jones’ unwillingness to engage with critics, and that the New York Times had quietly dropped several of her key arguments in later versions of the 1619 Project.[46]