2020 Convocation Speaker
Nikole Hannah-Jones
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES was named a MacArthur Genius for “reshaping national conversations around education reform”. This is
but one honor in a growing list: she’s won a Peabody, a Polk, and a National Magazine Award for her story on choosing a school for her daughter in a segregated city. Most recently, her New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project, on
the history and legacy of American slavery, went viral and garnered her even more honors for her groundbreaking journalism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine, and has spent years chronicling the way official policy has created—and maintains—racial segregation in housing and schools. Her deeply personal
reports on the black experience in America offer a compelling case for greater equity. She is the lead writer on the New York Times' major multimedia initiative, The 1619 Project. Named for the year the first enslaved Africans arrived
in America, the project features an ongoing series of essays and art on the relationship between slavery and everything from social infrastructure and segregation, to music and sugar—all by Black American authors, activists, journalists and
more. Nothing we know about American life today has been untouched by the legacy of slavery, and the 1619 Project quickly went viral, spreading its heartbreaking, unprecedented, and absolutely essential message worldwide. In November 2019, Random
House announced that they will be adapting the project into a graphic novel, and four publications for young readers; as well as releasing an extended version of the original publication, including more essays, fiction and poetry.
She has written extensively on the history of racism, school resegregation, and the disarray of hundreds of desegregation orders, as well as the decades-long failure of the federal government to enforce the landmark 1968 Fair Housing
Act. She is currently writing a book on school segregation called The Problem We All Live With, to be published on the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House. Her piece “Worlds Apart” in The New York Times Magazine won the
National Magazine Award for “journalism that illuminates issues of national importance” as well as the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. In 2016, she was awarded a Peabody Award and George Polk Award for radio reporting for her This American Life story,
“The Problem We All Live With.” She was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, and was also named to 2019’s The Root 100 as well as Essenece’s Woke 100. Her reporting has also won Deadline Club
Awards, Online Journalism Awards, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting, and the Emerson College President’s Award for Civic Leadership.
Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting with the goal of increasing the number of reporters and editors of color. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North
Carolina and earned her BA in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame. For the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies, she investigated social changes under Raul Castro and the impact of universal healthcare
on Cuba’s educational system. She was also selected by the University of Pennsylvania to report on the impact of the Watts Riots for a study marking the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report. Along with The New York Times,
her reporting has been featured in ProPublica, The Atlantic Magazine, Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, The Week Magazine, Grist, Politico Magazine, and on Face the Nation, This American Life, NPR, The Tom Joyner Morning Show,
MSNBC, C-SPAN, Democracy Now, and radio stations across the country.
