Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist best known for her work on the 1619 Project. She was born on April 9, 1976, in Waterloo, Iowa. Her father, Milton Hannah, is African American, and her mother, Cheryl A. Novotny, is both Czech and English. She was a part of a desegregation busing program to Waterloo West High School, an all-white school, when she was younger.
Hannah graduated in 1994 after writing for the school newspaper. She received her BA in history and African American studies from the University of Notre Dame in 1998. Hannah then received a Roy H. Park Fellowship from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where she earned her master’s degree in journalism in 2003.
Hannah stayed in North Carolina for three years, working for the Raleigh News & Observer, before moving to Portland, Oregon, and working for The Oregonian for six years. Hannah wrote about the 40th anniversary of the Watts Riots in 2007, and she studied universal healthcare in Cuba from 2008 to 2009 as part of her Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies Fellowship.
Her wedding date is unknown, but she married IT specialist Faraji Jones in the mid-2000s, and her husband adopted her surname, with the couple both using Hannah-Jones as their surname. In 2011, they welcomed their daughter Najya Hannah-Jones.
Hannah-Jones moved to New York after the birth of her daughter and began working for ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization. She joined The New York Times as a staff reporter in 2015, focusing on the inequities that people of color face. She established the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting in 2016. The society trains and mentors investigative journalists of color.
She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship the following year (2017). Soon after, she began work on the 1619 Project, a series of essays, poems, and photographs for the New York Times that examined the role of slavery and its long aftermath in American history. For “The 1619 Project,” Hannah-Jones received both national acclaim and criticism.
The project’s lead essay, “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written,” was false when it was written. “Black Americans have fought to make them true” earned her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Hannah-Jones has since retracted many of the project’s most contentious claims.
Hannah-Jones was offered a faculty position at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in April 2021. Because of the controversy surrounding “the 1619 Project,” the UNC Board of Trustees initially denied her tenure, which is usually associated with senior appointments such as hers.
UNC reversed its decision by June, but Hannah-Jones declined and accepted a tenured position at Howard University. She will be the University’s first Knight Chair in Race and Journalism, with $20 million in foundation funds and donations to support her work. Hannah-Jones has received over fifteen awards for her journalism and investigative reporting work.