The Sussman Lecture: A conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones
Friday, April 9, 2021 4:15 PM
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Nikole Hannah-Jones has "Waterloo" tattooed on her wrist. It reminds her, she said Thursday, of the Iowa city that made her -- and ultimately influenced the creation of the 1619 Project, a multimedia investigation into America’s racial history developed and led by Hannah-Jones at the New York Times.
"I wanted to show that you could treat racial inequality as an investigative beat," Hannah-Jones told Drake University professor Jennifer Harvey over Zoom at the 2021 Sussman Lecture, hosted by the Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement. "I’ve been studying and thinking about the arguments of 1619 since I was a college student, and I used to always joke with my editors that eventually my stories were all going to get back to 1619. I always put a lot of history in them, but I was never able to get all the way back until [2019]. Then the [400th] anniversary came, and I had this opportunity."