Nikole Hannah Jones's (nhannahjones) groundbreaking 1619 Project ignited a debate over how U.S. history is told—and who gets to tell it. With the arrival of an expanded book version, Hannah-Jones talks to alexis_ok about her life’s work.
During her sophomore year, Hannah-Jones took a Black studies class—from the only Black male teacher she would have, Ray Dial—and started to learn about Black culture and politics in a way she never had before. It felt exciting: Hannah-Jones was reading about apartheid and Cheikh Anta Diop’sand listening to Da Lench Mob and Ice Cube. She wore a Malcolm X medallion. She complained to Dial that the school newspaper never wrote about the experiences of Black students.
“I was intentionally trying to be provocative,” Hannah-Jones says. “I did a lot of writing about what it was like to come from the Black side of town and go to a white school, and that’s what I won my first journalism award for, from the Iowa High School Press Association. From there I was kind of hooked on wanting to be a journalist and write about the Black experience.
Hannah-Jones found the elite environment of Notre Dame even more alienating than her high school, but she knew having a prestigious degree would help her career. After getting that degree, she worked as an admissions counselor at a school in rural Indiana, part-time at Subway, and then as a receptionist and a salesperson at Macy’s before going to journalism school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
When “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” her investigation into racial segregation in New York City schools, was published inwhere she started working in 2015, liberal white people around her started to feel morally implicated and sought absolution from her. I was there when a prominent white male journalist awkwardly came up to her at a lunch and told her how difficult it was to make the decision about where to send his kids to school in Brooklyn.
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