Nikole Hannah Jones

Early life

Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is of Czech and English descent. She is the second of three sisters. In 1947, when her father was two years old, his family moved to Iowa from Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, along with many other African-American families.

Hannah-Jones and her sister attended almost all-white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She wrote for the high school newspaper and graduated from West High School in 1994.

Hannah-Jones has a bachelor's degree in History and African-American Studies from University of Notre Dame, which she received in 1998. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication with a master's degree in 2003, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.

Career

In 2003, Hannah-Jones began her writing career working covering the education beat, which included the predominantly African American Durham Public Schools, for the Raleigh News & Observer, a position she held for three years.

In 2006, Hannah-Jones moved to Portland, Oregon, where she wrote for The Oregonian for six years. During this time she covered an enterprise assignment that included feature work, then the demographics beat, and then the government & census beats.

In 2007, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots, Hannah-Jones wrote about its impact on the community for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission.

From 2008 to 2009, Hannah-Jones received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies which enabled her to travel to Cuba to study universal healthcare and Cuba’s educational system under Raul Castro.

In 2011, she joined the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which is based in New York City, where she covered civil rights and continued research she started in Oregon on redlining and in-depth investigative reporting on the lack of enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities. Hannah-Jones also spent time in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the effects of Brown v. Board of Education had little effect.

In 2015, she became a staff reporter for The New York Times.

Hannah-Jones is recognized as an authority on topics such as racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation in American schools and housing discrimination, and has spoken about these issues on national public radio broadcasts.

Her stories have been quoted in numerous other publications as being particularly important regarding race relations. 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. 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.

Personal life

Hannah-Jones lives in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, and their daughter.

Awards

Works and publications