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Schools of Choice

Nicole Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA) has emerged as an outspoken voice in education — celebrated for using her platform as a journalist to expose how the resegregation of America’s public schools is harming African-American and Latino children. (Photo by Karsten Moran/Redux Pictures)

Haunted by disparities that glare back at her, Nikole Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA) has focused her talent as a journalist on the dramatic differences in how we teach children in America.

by Elizabeth Leland ’76

During the turbulent summer of racial unrest and national debate in 2014, when a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old black man in Ferguson, Mo., there was a moment of news footage that Nikole Hannah-Jones kept revisiting.

As Michael Brown lay face down in the street, a television camera filmed his mother crying out in despair: “You took my son away from me. Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? … Not many.”

A child was dead, and his mother’s message to the world was not about her son’s lost future but rather about the struggle he faced to finish high school and graduate just eight days earlier. The words startled Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA), then an investigative reporter for ProPublica.

“I’m thinking if my child were lying dead behind me, I wouldn’t be thinking about school,” Hannah-Jones said. “But I promise you, I knew exactly the type of school Michael Brown attended. I Googled it and, after five minutes on the internet, I knew that was my next story. I would focus on the education he didn’t receive.”

Whether investigating Brown’s impoverished school district in Ferguson or her daughter’s segregated school in Brooklyn, Hannah-Jones has emerged as an outspoken voice in education — celebrated for using her platform as a journalist to expose how the resegregation of America’s public schools is harming African-American and Latino children. In October 2017, the MacArthur Foundation selected her as one of its genius fellows for “compelling us to confront segregation as a fundamental cause of racial disparities”; the same month, the GAA Board of Directors bestowed on her its Distinguished Young Alumni Award.


“If you read my work, you know my work is not hopeful or inspirational. If you came here tonight looking for inspiration, wrong speech. … I don’t want you to get inspired. I want you to feel ashamed.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA)

Such acclaim stems from what readers see in her work for The New York Times Magazine — how she challenges assumptions, digs through layer after layer to make readers think twice about what they believe to be true. She’s also writing a book on school segregation.

When she enters a room or walks onto a stage, Hannah-Jones is hard to miss. She commands attention with her fiery red hair. In big, billowy waves, it falls like corkscrews to her shoulders, conveying both an aura of hipness and an impression of authority.

Her hair, she says, matches her personality. The Beyoncé of journalism, some young reporters christened her, and Hannah-Jones thought it was so funny she included that on her Twitter profile: “Reporter @nytmag covering race in the U.S. from 1619-present//AKA The Beyoncé of Journalism … smart and thuggish.”

“I’m very passionate. I’m very blunt. I have a strong sense of right versus wrong, and I’m for the underdog,” she said. “I want to show that school segregation is not an accident — that people are intentionally making it so.”

She had been invited back to North Carolina as keynote speaker that night at the inaugural “Color of Education” summit at Duke University. Before beginning her talk, she warned the sold-out audience of 600: “If you read my work, you know my work is not hopeful or inspirational. If you came here tonight looking for inspiration, wrong speech. … I don’t want you to get inspired. I want you to feel ashamed.”

Ashamed, she said, that we live in a country with vast material wealth and resources, yet with many black and Latino children in segregated schools who are not getting the education they deserve.

“We do that as a choice.”

A critical school decision

In the months after Michael Brown’s death, Hannah-Jones visited his Normandy High School and discovered that the district was among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri and that it lost its accreditation because of dismal academic performance.

“News reports in the days and weeks after Brown’s death often noted his recent graduation and college ambitions,” she wrote, “the clear implication that the teen’s school achievements only deepened the sorrow over his loss.

“But if Brown’s education experience was a success story, it was a damning one.”

About half of African-American male students never graduate, she found. Five miles away, by contrast, more than 96 percent of students graduate from the Clayton Public Schools, which are predominantly white and have little poverty.

There’s nothing magical about sitting next to white students that makes black students smart, Hannah-Jones said. But she asserts that there’s never been a time in our nation’s history when black kids received the same quality education as white kids. The only proven way to ensure equality, she said, is through integration.

“I see my role as forcing us to confront what we’re choosing to do for our children,” she said. “But I don’t expect that we’ll do right by black children.”

Hannah-Jones’s MacArthur Foundation page, which includes links her work, is at bit.ly/choosing_a_school.

Not long after Hannah-Jones wrote about Ferguson, her own neighborhood in New York got caught up in an education battle. Administrators notified about 50 families in a predominantly white school that their children might be transferred to predominantly black, predominantly poor P.S. 307 in Brooklyn.

Hannah-Jones heard from people asking her to write about what was going on. She said they didn’t realize that her daughter, Najya, attended P.S. 307. Hannah-Jones didn’t want to be part of the story. But she felt compelled to tell it.

“I’d been wanting to do a story on Northern segregation,” she said. “I was tired of the Northern hypocrisy. Everybody was writing about the South. I’ve lived in the North most of my life, and I have seen the exact same type of racism, segregation, inequality in the North as I’ve seen in the South and oftentimes worse.”

Her piece — “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City: How one school became a battleground over which children benefit from a separate and unequal system” — combined historical research, analysis of current data and an account of the deeply personal decision she and her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, fought over and eventually agreed to make:

“I told Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school,” she wrote in The New York Times Magazine. “Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means ‘liberated’ and ‘free’ in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to ‘good’ public schools felt like implying that children in ‘bad’ schools deserved the schools they got, too. …

“Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. ‘Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?’ he asked. ‘Are we putting her at a disadvantage?’ ”

The story featured a photograph of Najya, adorable in a blue-plaid jumper with a serious look on her face.

“I had moments when I couldn’t ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter. I worried — I worry still — about whether I made the right decision for our little girl. But I knew I made the just one.”

Faraji Hannah-Jones, who is an information technology engineer for a large Hong Kong-based distribution design company, agrees. “That story was important, not just for middle-class African-Americans but more importantly for middle-class white people who were moving into the neighborhood and had been avoiding the conversation,” he said. “If you want to move into our neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and purchase a $1 million brownstone, you have inherited everything that comes with that. We need to look into our mirrors and ask: Are we truly living our values?”

Nikole, he said, lives hers.

One reader told her the story inspired her to enroll her daughter in a predominantly black school. But other readers chastised Hannah-Jones, saying in effect, “What kind of parent are you that you would sacrifice your daughter for some ideal?”

To which, Hannah-Jones responded, “Whose children should we sacrifice?”

Najya is now 8, in third grade. “She’s doing great,” Hannah-Jones said, anticipating a question that she’s often asked. “Middle-class kids who go into these schools do fine. They were already advanced. We can give them everything — trips to museums, travel, lots of books.”

Why she’s a reporter

Growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, Hannah-Jones had a very different educational experience. In 1982, her parents decided to send her and her older sister across town, an hour each way by bus, to a wealthy, predominantly white school rather than to their neighborhood’s low-income, predominantly black school. Her family was mixed race. Her mother, a probation and parole officer, is white; her father, a bus driver who died in 2007, was black. Hannah-Jones said she never thought of herself as biracial. She considered herself black, one of only five to 10 black students in an otherwise all-white school.

“We were raised on the black side of town. We lived in a black neighborhood. Our father told us when we were young that, although our mom was white, we would be treated as black. We would face the same discrimination.”

Nikole Hannah-Jone at her desk in the New York Times building in Midtown Manhattan. (Photo by Karsten Moran/Redux Pictures)

Milton Hannah called his daughter “Bird.” After he died, Hannah-Jones got a tattoo on her right foot in the shape of a colorful peacock feather, a reminder of her father. After she won the MacArthur fellowship, she got another tattoo, the name of her hometown on her right arm. She calls the Waterloo tattoo “my stay-humble tattoo.”

“I come from a small blue-collar Midwestern town, and I like to be reminded of that.”

Over the years, she has visited many high-poverty, predominantly black schools, and she said she noticed that the “light in the eyes” of younger students can fade by the time they reach higher grades. “When they’re kindergarten and first-grade students, they don’t know enough about how the world sees them … how little they are taught … how they are objects of fear.”

That moment of realization came in her own life around fifth grade. She regularly played with white classmates and swam in their neighborhood pool on the west side — the white side — of town. One weekend, she invited them to the pool on the east side — her black side — of town. One by one, her white friends called to say that they couldn’t come. “I just remember, somehow, that was the moment I understood that’s what it was about — that their parents were afraid.”

Her mother, Cheryl Hannah, said she didn’t understand the extent of the racial ostracism until years later. “You want to do what’s best for your kid,” she said, “and maybe I overlooked the racial issues because I was so focused on the education.”

Hannah-Jones became a reporter so she could write about race and racism. After she earned her master’s in journalism in 2003, she took a job with The News & Observer covering Durham’s heavily segregated schools. James Eli Shiffer was her editor in the Durham office, which he described as “a proving ground” for young journalists. He said Hannah-Jones stood out with a remarkable talent for sifting through data and presenting hard-hitting findings in compelling narratives.


“I had moments when I couldn’t ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter. I worried — I worry still — about whether I made the right decision for our little girl. But I knew I made the just one.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

“She had a combination of attention to storytelling and writing and sort of a fearlessness about tackling really controversial subjects,” said Shiffer, now an editor at the Star Tribune  in Minneapolis. “She really earned the confidence of people in the community just because of her clear interest in people and her accuracy and ability to see the big picture but not lose the kind of human dimension of it all.”

To make ends meet, Hannah-Jones moonlighted selling mattresses at the Better Sleep Store. It wasn’t the first time she juggled two jobs, a work ethic that colleagues said helped propel her to the top of her field as a journalist. Last fall, Columbia Journalism School honored her with its John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Now she’s reaching back. Several years ago, Hannah-Jones helped found the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting to train and mentor journalists of color. For her username on Twitter, she adopted the name of Ida B. Wells, the 19th-century journalist who was born into slavery and exposed the often-concealed truth behind lynching.

“Investigative reporting is the most critical reporting in our democracy, and it’s also the whitest,” Hannah-Jones said. “We just think that there are too many stories that are being missed when you don’t have diversity amongst investigative reporting. We decided we would train journalists ourselves. … My motto in life in general is to ‘try to be the person you needed when you were trying to make it.’ ”

One of those people in her life was DeWayne Wickham, former USA Today columnist, now dean of Morgan State University School of Global Journalism & Communication in Baltimore. In 2008, while working at The Oregonian, Hannah-Jones became a fellow at Wickham’s Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies and traveled with him to Cuba.

“She hungered to tell the stories of black people who had not yet realized all the freedoms and opportunities that this country offers,” he recalled. “She felt inhibited from doing that. Her growth as a writer had little to do with me or anyone else and more to do with setting her free.”

Her first “big, big investigation” into school segregation came in 2014 for ProPublica when she wrote about the resegregation of schools in Tuscaloosa, Ala. She told the story through three generations, beginning with a grandfather who attended segregated schools all his life to his daughter during desegregation and concluding with his granddaughter in a resegregated high school. As in all her stories, Hannah-Jones brought a historian’s perspective, drawing on her bachelor of arts in history and African-American studies from Notre Dame.

“I spent a little over a year on the story, and I would wake up in an absolute cold sweat,” she said. “I was an investigative reporter, and editors expect a change to come about because of your stories. I knew nothing would change. Nothing did change. But it was almost to me, what choice do I have but to keep writing?”

She wrote: “In Tuscaloosa today nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened. … Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.”

Some editors urge reporters to find happy endings for stories. Hannah-Jones says her stories don’t have happy endings, and she believes it’s important for readers to face that sobering reality. “I don’t want to take you on this journey of inequality and then let you off the hook at the end. I very intentionally end with what I hope will be a punch in the gut that will stick with you after the story is done.”

Separate, not equal

And so, as she concluded her talk in Durham, she showed a photograph of “one of the kids we decided to sacrifice.” D’Leisha Dent was the third generation in the family from Tuscaloosa and attended Central High, once a standard-bearer for integration, now 99 percent black. She was a member of the mayor’s youth council, class president, homecoming queen, state track star and had two dimples “that immediately make you fall in love.”

Hannah-Jones said that D’Leisha dreamed of attending her mother’s alma mater, the University of Alabama, and studying with people of different cultures. But when D’Leisha took a prep course for the ACT college admissions exam, she realized students from other schools had been taught so much more. She never scored high enough to be admitted.

“D’Leisha learned at a very young age that you can do everything this country tells you to do, everything right and people who don’t have your best interests, who don’t believe that black children deserve the same education as white children, will deprive you of the ability to change your life,” Hannah-Jones said. “Think about how it felt when she realized that, as Julian Bond said, violence is going to school for 12 years but only getting six years of education.”

D’Leisha was admitted to a historically black college. When she graduates, Hannah-Jones pointed out, she will have “attended 17 years of school in the United States of America without ever having attended school with a child who wasn’t black.”

Separate, Hannah-Jones says, has never been equal.

Elizabeth Leland ’76 is a freelance writer based in Charlotte.


 

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