Nikole Hannah-Jones  Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. In April 2015, she became a staff writer for "The New York Times", where she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020. Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is of Czech and English descent. Hannah-Jones is the second of three sisters. In 1947, when her father was two years old, his family moved north to Iowa from Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, as did many other African-American families. Hannah-Jones and her sister attended almost all-white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She attended Waterloo West High School, where she wrote for the high school newspaper and graduated in 1994. Hannah-Jones has a bachelor's degree in History and African-American Studies from the University of Notre Dame, which she received in 1998. While at Notre Dame Hannah-Jones penned an op-ed for The Observer in which she compared Columbus to Hitler, and referred to the “white race” as “devils.” She graduated from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media with a master's degree in 2003, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow. In 2003, Hannah-Jones began her career covering the education beat, which included the predominantly African American Durham Public Schools, for the Raleigh "News & Observer," a position she held for three years. In 2006, Hannah-Jones moved to Portland, Oregon, where she wrote for "The Oregonian" for six years. During this time she covered an enterprise assignment that included feature work, then the demographics beat, and then the government & census beats. In 2007, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots, Hannah-Jones wrote about its impact on the community for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission. From 2008 to 2009, Hannah-Jones received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies which enabled her to travel to Cuba to study universal healthcare and Cuba's educational system under Raul Castro. In 2011, she joined the nonprofit news organization "ProPublica," which is based in New York City, where she covered civil rights and continued research she started in Oregon on redlining and in-depth investigative reporting on the lack of enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities.