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NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
AGE: 47
BEST KNOWN FOR: Spending five years at The Oregonian before rocketing into the journalism stratosphere (and ruffling some feathers) as the creator of The New York Times’ 1619 Project.
What follows is the inverse of a traditional “Remember so-and-so?” profile. Turns out some people become more famous after they leave Portland.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is one such case. With her signature cherry-colored hairdo and every major journalism award under her belt, Hannah-Jones has been hard to miss since 2019.
That’s when she launched The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a far-ranging investigation of race and civil rights in America, timed to the 400th anniversary of the first ship of enslaved Africans arriving on the shores of Virginia. The project won her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary—as well as backlash from some historians and conservative politicians who called it historically inaccurate.
But before all that, Hannah-Jones worked at The Oregonian. She covered demographics, the census and county government from 2006 to 2011. Reached by phone at her Washington, D.C., office last week, Hannah-Jones reminisced about her time at The O.
“It was a very challenging place and time in my life journalistically,” she says.
Hannah-Jones was drawn to The Oregonian, she says, because it was known as a narrative-journalism paper. She got “amazing coaching” from former managing editor Jack Hart.
“But I did often really, really struggle to write the stories that were important to me,” she says. “And that’s ultimately why I wanted to leave. But I also wanted to leave Portland, period.”
Hannah-Jones hasn’t been in Portland for about five years, but when she visits, she enjoys hiking at Multnomah Falls or going cherry picking on Hood River’s fruit loop. Her must-visit restaurants are Andina, Gravy and Screen Door. But world-class hiking and food weren’t enough to keep her in the Pacific Northwest.
“It will surprise no one when I say that Portland is a very difficult place to be Black,” she says. “I wanted to move somewhere that had a much more substantial Black population and culture.”
She chose Brooklyn, where she has lived since 2012 when she started at journalism nonprofit ProPublica. Her first big investigation there was about the lack of enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act—a project that she says grew directly from her work reporting on housing laws at The Oregonian.
In addition to being a Times staff writer, Hannah-Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The post came after a fraught back-and-forth with the University of North Carolina, where she was denied a tenure position.
She is currently working on a young readers’ adaptation of The 1619 Project, as well as a coffee table book. The six-part documentary is available on Hulu.