Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist known for delving deep into the current civil rights issues facing the United States. From 2003 to 2007, she worked mainly for local media outlets in Raleigh-Durham and Oregon, where she worked for The Oregonian for six years. In 2008, she received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies. That allowed her to travel to Cuba, where she studied how universal healthcare worked under Raul Castro. In 2011, she worked for the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica, and from there, she became a staff writer for the New York Times in 2015.
Why They Made the Worthy 100: In 2017 she received a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 earned the Pulitzer Prize for her work on the still-controversial 1619 Project. The project consists of a series of New York Times Magazine articles aimed at changing how America views slavery. She timed it to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved African arriving in Virginia. The series is mainly essays by Hannah-Jones and other influential writers, including Princeton University’s Matthew Desmond and Kevin Kruse. It also has poems, short fiction, and a photo essay by other authors. New York University’s Arther L. Carter Journalism Institute named it one of the ten most significant works of journalism of the last decade, and in 2022 it garnered Hannah-Jones the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Nonfiction.Â
