Nikole Hannah-Jones

Journalist

Class of 2017

ABOUT NIKOLE’S WORK

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist chronicling the demise of racial integration efforts and persistence of segregation in American society, particularly in education. She combines analyses of historical, academic, and policy research with moving personal narratives to bring into sharp relief a problem that many are unwilling to acknowledge still exists and its tragic consequences for African American individuals, families, and communities.

Her profile of three generations of a family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in “Segregation Now” (2014) illustrates the historical trajectory of segregation in many school districts in the South. A grandfather attended school before judicial force dismantled Jim Crow–era segregated schools; his daughter, a college graduate, was educated in an integrated school district. But after the district was released from judicial oversight in the 1990s, it effectively became re-segregated; his granddaughter now attends an all-black school that is so poorly resourced it leaves its students far behind their white counterparts. After the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Hannah-Jones spent several months investigating a short-lived integration program in the (mostly white, high-achieving) school district 30 miles from (all-black, almost entirely poor, and unaccredited) Normandy School District, where Brown attended high school. The resulting hour-long radio piece, “The Problem We All Live With” (2015), unflinchingly conveys the failings of our educational system and exposes how the decisions we make as individuals and collectively as a society have created and perpetuate our two-tier education system. In a particularly poignant section, Hannah-Jones juxtaposes the delight and joy in the voices of a student and her mother contemplating the opportunity to apply to a high school outside of Normandy with the voices of white parents decrying the violence and drop in test scores that they claim will result from the influx of Normandy students.

Hannah-Jones’s deeply personal account of her own experience as a parent in New York City’s public school system, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City” (2016), shows that school segregation is not an isolated phenomenon but rather a defining factor of most cities across the country. Currently at work on a book about school segregation, Hannah-Jones is compelling us to confront segregation as a fundamental cause of racial disparities and reshaping national conversations about education reform.

BIOGRAPHY

Nikole Hannah-Jones received a B.A. (1998) from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. (2003) from the University of North Carolina. She was a reporter for the Raleigh News and Observer (2003–2006), the Oregonian (2006–2011), and ProPublica (2011–2015) prior to joining the staff of the New York Times. In 2015, she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting with the goal of increasing the number of reporters and editors of color.

Source: MacArthur Foundation