Education
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates to Launch Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University
Hannah-Jones and Coates add to the list of media heavy hitters who have recently joined the faculty at Howard.
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, known best for his book “Between the World and Me,” are launching a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University, the pair announced Tuesday.
The center will focus on training the next generation of Black journalists to develop “the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing,” according to a press release the from university.
“We are at a critical juncture in our democracy, and yet our press does not reflect the nation it serves and too often struggles to grasp the danger for our country as we see growing attacks on free speech and the fundamental right to vote,” Hannah-Jones said in the release. “In the storied tradition of the Black press, the Center for Journalism and Democracy will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.”
The center is supported by nearly $20 million in grants from two philanthropic foundations and an anonymous donor. Hannah-Jones’ decision to join the faculty at Howard, an HBCU, instead of UNC-Chapel Hill, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was offered a non-tenured position, was praised online. Hannah-Jones will serve as Howard’s newly created Knight Chair in Race and Journalism. Coates, once a student at Howard University (though he didn’t graduate), will be on the faculty of the College Arts of Sciences.
Hannah-Jones has authored award-winning stories on topics such as school segregation. But the 1619 Project, in which she sought to retell the role of slavery in the development of the United States, drew outrage from conservatives and former President Donald Trump. Bills were introduced to ban the use of the texts in school, and it sparked the ongoing debate around critical race theory.
Coates has also written seminal texts on race in America. His 2014 cover story in Atlantic magazine, “The Case for Reparations,” relaunched the conversation around reparations into the mainstream. More recently, Coates has made his stamp on culture as author on a series of recent Black Panther comic books.
Hannah-Jones and Coates add to the list of media heavy hitters who have recently joined the faculty at Howard.
Actress Phylicia Rashad, who also attended Howard, joined the school’s faculty as dean of the re-launched College of Fine Arts (now named for the late actor Chadwick Boseman, also a Howard alum) earlier this year.
Rashad drew criticism last month after celebrating Bill Cosby’s release from prison on Twitter, writing that “a terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!” The university put out a statement saying that Rashad’s views did not represent those of the university and that she would be required to take a sensitivity course on sexual assault. That decision also proved controversial online.
