Activist New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones made news in 2019 as principal author of the error-ridden, Times-produced 1619 Project, which erroneously dates America’s founding from the arrival of the first slaves on our continent’s shores and falsely describes our country’s founding mainly as a project to preserve slavery. Hannah-Jones’s fanciful racialization of our national past, perhaps inspired by her revealing early-life comment that the “white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world,” drew sharp rebukes from professional historians of all political stripes, and even from some of her own colleagues at the Times, which initially stood by the author and her flawed work but later issued a series of halting and dilatory corrections.
Nevertheless, the 1619 Project was a great career boon for Hannah-Jones, who had already obtained employment at the former paper of record and, in 2017, was awarded a lucrative MacArthur Fellowship. Her introductory essay to the 1619 Project won her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. A year later, she was elected to the once-prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A generously endowed tenured professorship in “Race and Journalism” and center directorship at historically black Howard University quickly followed, despite her having neither received a doctorate nor previously taught as a university faculty member. The 1619 Project went on to inform curricula in thousands of school districts.
Over this past weekend, however, Hannah-Jones descended from the Olympian heights of minority privilege to make a startling admission in the pages of the Times’ magazine. “These days,” she wrote of her teenaged daughter Najya, “I feel that I failed both my values and my child . . . by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her.” Despite considering her family “upper-middle class,” thanks to her husband’s access to integrated military schools and her own racially mixed parents’ availing of integration measures to send her to a predominantly white school, Hannah-Jones consigned Najya to New York City Public School 307, whose poor, troubled, and predominantly black student body has caused it to become known as “Little Rikers Island”—named for New York City’s infamous prison, which is allegedly so bad that it is slated to be decommissioned. According to a Manhattan Institute investigation, P.S. 307 spends about $52,000 per student every year despite alarmingly poor academic results.
As well-paid, nationally famous professionals, who in 2018 reportedly paid $1.5 million for a brownstone house in Brooklyn’s hip Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the Hannah-Joneses might have sent Najya to a much better school, public or private, or at least one that used its resources more judiciously. But they chose not to, in the belief that sending their only child to P.S. 307 would strike a blow for social justice and encourage other progressive parents to do the same. “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there,” Hannah-Jones condescendingly reflects, as though her family’s mere presence in the impoverished school’s community would work on it like some sort of educational fertilizer. As recently as 2024, the The New York Post reported, she wrote that after eight years of watching P.S. 307 underserve her daughter, “I still know we made the right choice.”
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