once again. take note of every single word she says, especially, cyber security is a matter of public safety. dan: -- foster care the system in ways defined permanent homes for foster children. investigative journalist nikole hannah-jones, who writes about racial segregation in the united state schools, she talks about her reporting on the issue and why school segregation persists today. this is one hour and 15 minutes.

ms. hannah-jones: good evening, everyone. welcome students, faculty, and guests. to those of you who don't know me yet -- i am the academic dean of the journalism school. tonight we have a very special delacorte lecturer. special in many respects. -- not onlyis own because there are a wonderful guest, but it is the first public performance of our new delacorte professor. the delacorte lectures are a tradition here at the journalism school. aimed to let students into what's happening in the magazine industry and in magazine journalism. they are run by the delacorte center for magazine journalism established here at the journalism school in 1984 by the magazine publisher george delacorte and was supported by his wife valerie. and with her, the new york community trust.

george delacorte founded the all publishing empire and was beloved and rather eccentric philanthropist. he contributed to some of the architectural wonders you see on campus and has also famously donated the alice in wonderland statue in central park. we are grateful to the s and in your community trust for their support of journalism education in our robust magazine program. and now, i would like to introduce one star of our evening keith gessen, before , joining us here, keith was the founding editor of m plus one, an influential new york magazine of culture and politics. if you have not read this, you should. go to the web right now and check it out. keith is also a contributor to the new yorker. and, the london review of books.

he is editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator from russian for a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and the words of -- and they work of oral history. he is an author of a novel and he is also writing a new one. i hand this over to keith and i will have him introduce our guest for tonight, nikole he is also writing a hannah-jones. [applause] prof. gessen: thank you, sheila, for that wonderful introduction. thank you all for coming. i'm really excited and honored to have nikole hannah-jones of "the new york times" magazine here as our first delacorte speaker of the year. nikole began her career in newspapers and works at the news and observer in raleigh-durham. working on the education beat.

she moved to portland all the way across the country to work at the oregonian. there she focused on housing discrimination. ms. hannah-jones: for part of the time. prof. gessen: then she moved to new york to start at pro-public where she published a series of incredibly important and moving and highly recommended pieces about the resegregation of america's cities and schools. not just segregation, that anyone who is not blind is aware of, but the actual active, continuing process of resegregation of our cities and educational system. a year ago, she was hired away by the new york times magazine, where she is continuing her work.

there are two reasons i'm happy we are having this conversation. one is that i think because this is supposed to be a magazine focused lecture series, the work le has beenat niko doing is incredibly complex. i do think the fact that she has republica andt the new york times magazine, those places have given her the space to do this kind of work. it was harder to do in newspapers. ms. hannah-jones: very hard. prof. gessen: the other reason is unfortunately, this is an incredibly relevant story right now. one of the most difficult, interesting, and significant pieces that nikole has done was about ferguson in the wake of michael brown shooting. where she went and looked at the

school that michael brown attended and the history of that school in segregated st. louis. it seems to me like resegregation is a story that is kind of underneath an undergirding a lot of the news stories we're seeing all the time in the united states right now. please welcome nikole hannah-jones. [applause] prof. gessen: the outline of the evening is i'm going to ask questions and then about 6:50, we will have questions from the audience and then about 7:15, we will be done. nikole, i thought we would start just by telling us a little about how you got started and why you decided to become a journalist. whether you found journalism school you attended useful, and how did you get your first job? ms. hannah-jones: thank you for coming out tonight, i'm happy to

be here, i come to campus for various events. i appreciate you coming out to listen to me talk. i became a journalist -- i grew up in iowa, let's get that out there. there are black people in iowa. we are mostly related, we know almost everyone. there were enough of us that we still had a grade of segregation. we'll all lived on one side of town and i started my education in segregated schools. from an early age, i was very curious about why the black neighborhood i lived in was one way and across the river, white people seems to be living a very different life. i was always a skeptical person, even as a child, which also got me into trouble as a child, but has proven to be a good life skill. i was always very curious. i started reading a lot and i was always very enchanted with history, because history helps explain the world to me and when

when i was in probably fifth grade or six grade, i wrote my first letter to the editor when , i was in middle school. i was a bit of a nerd, i'm ok with that now. once i got to high school, i took this black studies class. i was bussed as part of a voluntary desegregation program, and i went to a high school that was about 20% black. our high school offered a one semester black studies course and i took the class and was complaining to the teacher, my only black male teacher that i think i ever had, that our high school paper never wrote about kids like us. he told me that if i didn't like it, i should join the paper or be quiet. i took it as a challenge and joined the paper. i had a column called from the african perspective. i wrote about black kids and my classmates and what our experiences were like.

i won my first journalism award from the iowa high school press association and was kind of hooked after that. i only applied to college, one university of notre dame, which did not offer journalism. they offered history, which i loved. i majored in history and african-american studies. i wasn't sure if i was going to be an historian or a journalist. ultimately decided that journalists write history as it's happening and journalists write for the masses. historians write for college students and other historians. i really want to write about people like me, but write about it in real time. so i went to journalism school, real carolina blue, not like this columbia blue. i was at the university of north carolina in chapel hill and i went to grad school. it was a two-year program and i loved it.

it was great. they had a program for people who wanted to be academics and people like myself who wanted to be professionals but didn't have a journalism background. that is how i got where i am. prof. gessen: how did you get your first job? ms. hannah-jones: my first job was in raleigh, about 30 minutes from chapel hill. i went to a job there as part of the national association of black journalists. i had done no internships. there were some class papers to the managing editor at the observer at the time and he very kindly told me don't ever come to a job fair with class papers again. you need to go get some clips. i took his advice and came back the next year with clips and he hired me as an intern. when i graduated, he hired me as a reporter. my first job was as a public schools reporter in the city of durham, which was half black, half white, pretty liberal college town, that's where duke

is and since i went to carolina, i hate duke. [laughter] prof. gessen: i started covering public education in a high poverty school district right at the height of no child left behind. we saw the rise of high-stakes testing. and, the belief that if we test and hold segregated high poverty schools to a high level of accountability that suddenly we would get results like white schools. this is where i started my journalism career. very early on i was looking at the results come of the devastating result of school reform that was leaving kids in segregated high poverty schools, which is what really got me interested in the subject. prof. gessen: where the stories you were writing about about segregation and testing? were you able to get that into the newspaper? what were the kind of hooks you had to use? at that time,es:

i had a great editor. durham was a town where every story was about race. it was equally divided, black and white. it was a great deal of power sharing. the city council is half black, half white, the school board was half white, half black and had a black mayor. race was kind of at the forefront of all the politics in that town. the whole premise of no child left behind was we're going to count every student and look at the race of every student and we are not going to leave black and brown kids behind. no child left behind was based on race. it was very easy to pitch stories looking at what were the ramifications of this high-stakes testing and for those of you -- there's a lot of young folks, i don't know how much you know about a child left -- no child left behind but , these high poverty segregated schools would not be able to meet the same standards as white schools and then schools would be taken over and they would

implement all of these reforms that would never work. it was very easy for me to pitch stories about race because the entire federal educational bureaucracy was looking at race at that time. prof. gessen: implement all of these reforms s like this is not working? ,it is june and the test scores are bad? what were the daily stories you could write? ms. hannah-jones: i was spending a lot of time in those schools that were failing, and talking cipals and really spending time in heavily white schools, even though was a majority black district, it had very little poverty. and just fundamentally spending time in those classrooms and understanding there was no way you were going to get the same result out of those two schools. it wasn't a matter of parents not wanting education for their children or kids not trying, or teachers and principals not trying, but when you have a school where 20% of kids are poor. and a school where 99% of kids are poor, to expect those kids are going to do the same, with

the same resources -- it's not as if poor schools were getting inordinately more resources. i started really looking at all of the things that reformers were saying would work, and then asking why aren't they working? this was the era of constant experimentation with black schools. we're going to replace all the principles -- the principals divide them into , small schools. we're going to turn them in the special ed schools, we will try to do a magnet. every few years, these kids were being experimented on, but the test results were always the same. that's when we begin to question -- can you accomplish educational equity within segregated schools? you just cannot find a school that was able to do it. you can find elementary schools that might turn around for your two and then the scores would slide down. never found a middle school was able to turn around and you never found a high school.

every educator when they were not on the record when they were , being honest, would say what we're being asked to do was impossible. when nine of 10 kids are coming in here hungry, they are already behind when they are coming into the classroom. a teacher, if you can imagine, as a teacher when you have four kids who are behind in a class of 25, that's one thing. when you have 21 kids who are behind in a class of 25, and you are being asked to do the same thing with those same resources, you will not get the same results. the system was set up to fail, but set up to make it fail like politically, it was ok to say we are going to hold poor schools accountable because white parents in these liberal towns, just like white parents in all towns didn't really want , integration or to do the thing that was necessary to give these kids the same education. prof. gessen: you said at this point you realized the one thing that would work, integration, is the one thing that people refused to do.

ms. hannah-jones: it was a process. i was a brand-new reporter. i was an older reporter. internrobably the oldest at the observer, i was 27 years old and in turning. i was new to journalism and education, just learning about education coverage. it wasn't necessarily what i sought out to cover as a journalist. i didn't know what i wanted to cover, i just knew i wanted to write about race. so i was learning a lot, but because i did not already have preconceived notions about what would work and what should work in education, i could just look at all the things they were doing and test them out and say where are the results? , where's the school that is segregated and poor that consistently performing on par is with these other schools? you could not find the results. i also love research. i read a lot. i read a lot of history and sociology. every study that comes out in this area, i was reading. it is really starting to formulate in my mind this

picture where if we could do it, someone would have done it. if you can't ever show a place that did it, maybe we should stop pretending this thing is working. everyone knew it wasn't going to work, but it was the most politically expedient thing. prof. gessen: i feel like the great story you have arrived at is the story of resegregation. when did you start feeling like that was what you were seeing? ms. hannah-jones: i mean, there are two stories. i grew up in the north and it is not really resegregation in the north. it's just continuous segregation. it really wasn't until i move down south that i experienced living in -- the south has been the most integrated part of the country in terms of housing and schools for the last 45 years. so the story of resegregation is really a southern story. the northern story is the story of a willful blindness to the continuous ongoing segregation

that has always been here. at much higher levels than we see in the south the last 50 years. i think when i really started -- i find annoying people who write about race but always write about it as if these inequalities just flow down from the sky, as if they are all a legacy of the past and the only important work that we value is who is the racist of the week and who can we show who said something verifiably racist? or we write about studies that say black people are doing badly here, they're living in these conditions. which isn't news to anyone. we know that. i want to understand why, like, what is causing this? wire neighborhoods still segregated 50 years after we fair housing act? when you look across every

measure, black and latino students are getting the least qualified teachers, less likely to get access to academic courses that would get you into an institution like columbia, systemically across the country. i want to understand why that was. so that is really when my work began to focus on looking at the particular actions that we had taken in the past, but also, that people are taking right now that maintain segregation and racial inequality. with schools, resegregation was a way to do that, because if the place had been segregated and then it was integrated, you could go back to that point where it starts resegregating and show that somebody had to do something. i started looking at school districts that have been ordered by a federal court to integrate. they laid out certain things that you as a school district must do. you have to have racial balance

or pair a white school and a black school. once a school district is released from that court order, they can do whatever they want. they can create all-black school that they want to as long , as they never say we are doing this because we want to discriminate against black kids, they can do whatever they want. it was easy then to go to this point where a school district or school have been integrated and now it was going backwards and you could find who did what. who made this decision that re-segregated the school, and then asked them about it. when i wrote about tuscaloosa, i could literally go to the record and look at the public meetings where they are voting to create an all-black feeder system of schools. i could show the map where someone sat down and drew an attendance zone that would create an all segregated school, and you could show them the intent in a way that we don't write about racial discrimination and inequality, were we ever show intent in conscious action. i think that is what my work has been trying to do, is showing this history.

we also know americans don't really care about history. and they certainly want to ignore the history of race in this country. so really setting up how we got here, but also saying this is not our legacy, the people right now are making decisions that maintain this and i'm going to show you how that works. was it the red pill or the blue pill on the matrix? whatever pellet was where you could see all the code, that is what i think of my work is doing. we live in this computer program, where we can cut a -- we can kind of pretend that all of this is accidental and we go about our lives and people all kind of have the same choice because we all on paper have the same rights. my work is like showing that code behind where all of these , inequalities happen and how they happen. prof. gessen: the tuscaloosa story, what were the sort of stories you could do for the newspaper and then, what stories

could you not do for the newspaper? ms. hannah-jones: segregation was like 10,000 words, so you could never write anything that long. what that allowed me to do was tell the story from -- i would say my story started in 1619, which is the year that the first africans were brought to this country as slaves. or to be slaves. i say that because i think you just cannot understand anything about racial inequality today without going back and looking at a lot of things that happened in the past. with a newspaper, you just can't take the time to build a history into the story. but i think that fundamentally helps you understand. everyone always wants to know why is it still like that? and i said because we have been working on this for 400 years and we've only been working to undo it for maybe 50, and then, halfheartedly.everyone always ww understanding how systems over 400 years were created helps us understand how much work it will

take to undo it. there isfor that in a newspaper, you can get may be two paragraphs. iece, twoegation now p thirds of the story's history. only one third of that story takes place in the present. if you look at the piece adjusted in the new york times magazine, i would say about half of that story is in the past and half of it is in the present. i think that is what is so important is building this case that one then cannot deny of how this inequality is structural and systemic and nonaccidental, and that it was socially engineered, and therefore, we are going to have to socially engineer our way out of it. prof. gessen: you said when you won the best black journalist of the year, you said you were considering quitting journalism towards the end of your time at the oregonian. can you say why? ms. hannah-jones: of course, the

speech is on the record. what i have found, and a lot of journalists of color find, is that newsrooms want phenotype diversity. they want diverse people, people who look diverse. they do not want people who think diverse or think about stories of race in a different way. when i went to the oregonian, i made it very clear -- i only ever became a journalist because i wanted to write about racial inequality. i like writing about other things sometimes, but when -- what called me to be a journalist was to tell those stories. when i got to the oregonian, it wasn't what they wanted me to do. over and over i would find myself pitching stories and being marginalized for those stories, being told i couldn't write the stories. at that point, i went to the oregonian in 2006 and that was right when the industry, the newspaper industry was really in a freefall. there was nowhere for me to go.

i had to stick it out there. after five years of struggling to tell the stories that i got into journalism to do, i was considering leaving. i was at the point where i felt i wasn't doing what i got in to do anyways, so why was i doing this? maybe i should think of something else. the problem was i couldn't think , of anything else i would rather be doing. i do feel like this is my calling. i was close, but i could never kind of make the leap into doing something else, because i couldn't imagine what else i would do with my life. prof. gessen: how did you end of the pro-publica? ms. hannah-jones: i was rescued. the founder was the managing editor at the oregonian when i was there. i worked with him and he brought me on. point when iat the probably would have left journalism in the next six months. i said this at my speech, the

national association of black journalists that he saved my life in that way, because this is my calling. if you would not have taken me out of that situation, when he brought me to pro-publica, i said, i can't write the stories, don't hire me. he gave me free reign, now i'm here. prof. gessen: you said you see a lot of journalists in a similar position who didn't get rescued. is that right? ms. hannah-jones: yes. i mean, i could go down the list of black and brown journalists who have left news because they became very disillusioned with not being up to write the stories they got into journalism to write. i think newsrooms can be very unfriendly to people who don't just look diverse, but actually want to tell those stories in a very particular way. one of the things i heard was you want to write about black people too much. i remember having this conversation with the editor at the oregonian, saying have you ever had that conversation with a white journalist?

have you ever told a white journalist that they are writing about white people too much? you can't even imagine that conversation happening, though it should. when i was told that i went back , to our old story system and printed out every story i had ever written since i had been there. i put on a stack every story that even had a black person in it, even if i didn't identify the person as black i just knew the person was black, and it was 10% of my stories. literally, 10%. i took those two stacks into that office and i was like what is it about you and me that makes you think that me writing 10% of my stories about black people is too much? it wasn't a really good answer, because in their head, they overestimated how many stories they thought i was writing about race. and what i was always told was, there are not that many black people here, you are not writing to our audience. but you will never get that audience if you're not telling the stories. it's also not an accurate reflection of our society and our communities that we're

supposed to be covering. [laughter] prof. gessen: yesterday, during the debate, some people were snapping, but no one could hear them. at the oregonian, i read some of the pieces that you did about housing discrimination and those seemed to feed directly into the big piece that you then did about the fair housing act, right? it does seem like you were building a kind of -- really, also with your education work. what was it like to come to a position where you are now allowed to write at length with five or six or seven years of really solid day-to-day reporting on it? that must've been nice. ms. hannah-jones: it was amazing and scary. when you're writing something every week or every two weeks, not that many people read it, it's not that big a deal. when you've spent a year on something, it had better be

good. there's a lot of pressure, but it was an amazing feeling to finally go from where i always felt i could do bigger work and i wanted to do bigger work. i was always interested in doing more investigative work, but as we know, a lot of times, women and journalists of color are not seen and groomed to be on teams to do larger work. to have someone who trusted i could do that and just given the freedom to do it was the most amazing experience in the world. that is part of the reason i recently founded an organization to help more journalists of color become investigative reporters because i feel it is the most important work we can do in a democracy, holding it -- holding power accountable for how it treats our most vulnerable citizens. but what it allowed me to do and what i will always love about propublica is there was not a template for the type of writing

i was trying to do. not in investigative reporting, anyway. they trusted me to do it and let me do my thing. is anything i would say to editors, lead journalist do their thing and you'll be amazed at what they are able to produce. but you do not see that enough. prof. gessen: how would you describe the sort of work you did there, when you say there was not enough? ms. hannah-jones: long, lots of work. prof. gessen: excellent. when you say there was not a template, what do you mean? ms. hannah-jones: my work is not traditional investigative reporting in that way. i spent a lot of time building this historical case. if you look at my more recent work, it definitely has a point of view. i am not trying to go down the middle and say i am just laying out a dispassionate viewing of the facts. i am making an argument at this point.

i think that is not the usual way this is done. but they let me. they gave me the freedom to do that. i think one, because the reporting is sound. even though i am coming from a point of view that segregation is wrong and we should do something about it, the reporting is very sound. but also, to give that much space to things -- when i was writing about school segregation, a lot of people were dead that i was talking about. typically when you are doing investigations, you are writing about people doing things only now. propublica wanted to have an impact, so they want you to do a story where someone will lose their job or some law will get changed. i'm writing about school or housing segregation fully expecting when this publishes nothing will change ever. i still don't think it really will. but they let me do that not expecting i'm going to get some

law passed or there would be this huge shift in our society because of the work. a lot of reporters spend a year on an investigation that will likely not produce any result except people may be outraged. it is a pretty amazing thing. i see myself as making a record. i am hoping that forcing us to confront things we do not want to confront, whether we are going to fix them or not. i am always thinking about people trapped in these communities, what they could be if we treated them as full citizens. i'm thinking about the children trapped in these classrooms who someone says her daughter could be the doctor that saved your life one day, and we are squandering these children. that is what i am thinking about even if i don't think my writing will change the situation for them. i'm not going to let us pretend they are not there. prof. gessen: one of the

powerful things about your work is a lot of americans feel if we give it 300 years, this stuff will work itself out. but these kids don't have 300 years. they are in school for 10 years. you come to propublica with this background doing a lot of reporting and you have these two big stories, school segregation and housing segregation which are connected. how do you go about choosing how to tackle these giant subjects? how do you go about choosing? ms. hannah-jones: the good thing is there was one great thing that came out of my very hard time at "the oregonian." it was a narrative paper. that is ultimately why i went there. it believed in narrative journalism. i believed in narrative journalism because i understand you can do these fabulous investigations, and if they are dry no one will read them. if you do not connect with people on a human level, it does not matter you have found this

wrongdoing. that is all been my instinct, to tell these hard stories through compelling narrative. i am always at the beginning thinking about the narrative, what is the device or structure that can drive this story that is hard to read? when i did "segregation now" on tuscaloosa, part of the narrating process of how i would tell the story had to do with the narrative. tuscaloosa is where george wallace stands in the schoolhouse door. it is alabama, the cradle of the confederacy, the cradle of the civil rights movement. i am thinking about that when i am choosing where i will go. i am investigating how the resegregation happened here, who are the characters, and can i tell the story in a way -- what

is interesting, the black elite worked with the white elite to resegregate the schools. prof. gessen: in case people have not read the article, for the tv audience at home, tuscaloosa had a big integrated central high school that was integrated in the late 1970's and 1980's. it had a powerhouse in football and debate. and then they resegregated. ms. hannah-jones: right. most people don't know brown v. board happened. they did not hold hands or have a kumbaya moment. there was a lot of foot dragging and school districts had to be brought to court. real integration did not come to tuscaloosa until 1988, which is fairly common. there was a white high school and a black high school and a black middle school and a white middle school. the judge merged those.

everyone went to the same high school. he created this blockbuster powerhouse high school. it was like the dream of integration, the imperfect dream of integration. the district was also experiencing a lot of white flight. as soon as they were released from the court order, they destroyed the integrated high school and created three high schools and an entire feeder system of all-black poverty schools. that was a fascinating story. you had this place that was forced to integrate 30 years after brown v. board and then creates this amazing high school that is kicking everybody's butt. it was beating sports teams across the country, producing all these national merit scholars. and even that was not enough to hold integration together.

you could go and look at this place and what they did to create these all-black schools, but also the black elite was part of that. that was all part of the calculation in why i chose to tell the story of resegregation from tuscaloosa. before i went there, i knew i wanted to tell it through the generations of one family. i knew that. i hoped i would find the family to tell it through. i understood so much of the history would take place in the past. if i wanted people to care about it, i needed a human face to connect them from the past to the present. luckily, i found the perfect family pretty early on. prof. gessen: you talked to other families who were less perfect. ms. hannah-jones: yeah. the main character, the young lady at the all-black high school, she is everything, class president, state track champion,

everything we tell kids they should be if they want to be successful, she was but she was , at a segregated high school failing her in terms of her education. what made the family perfect is i wanted a grandparent who had gone through segregated schools after brown to show how desegregation did not come to this country after brown and whose parent had gone to the integrated high school in that town as a result of the court order and now found the grandchild back in the segregated schools that looked just like the grandparents attended. that is what i was looking for and that is what i found in the family. prof. gessen: are there a lot of schools like that, that were integrated and became un-integrated? ms. hannah-jones: the south experienced a wave of desegregation because the only thing that held it back with the federal court orders. integration in

this country and that is the method we tell ourselves. we tell ourselves we wanted it, tried hard, and failed. we failed because we did not really want it. there was a brief time where the federal government was forcing it. where it forced it, many times it did work. as soon as we started releasing the court orders that were 40 or 50 years old, the supreme court made it increasingly easy for districts to be released from their court orders. when they were released, we went back to our natural state of things which is to immediately , do things to resegregate. the peak of integration in this country was 1988 when i was in middle school. now black students are as segregated as they were in 1972. the typical experience of a black student in this country is to attend a segregated, high poverty school. the typical experience of a white student in this country is to attend a low poverty high school.

prof. gessen: in reporting the tuscaloosa story, as you mentioned, the resegregation was kind of agreed to buy black two by black leaders in the community because they were afraid they would not be able to attract businesses if they did not have a high-quality, majority white school basically. ms. hannah-jones: right. prof. gessen: when did you find that out, early in the reporting or, were you surprised to find that out? was your initial reaction like this is not a good case or were you excited? what was your reaction? ms. hannah-jones: i think it is great for the narrative. it gives texture and nuance. there were all these compromises that have happened. school desegregation was very hard on black communities. it was always the black schools that were shut down, the black teachers and principals fired, black kids getting long bus rides to go into white schools.

for many of the black civil rights leaders who pushed for desegregation, they felt the cost had been too high for black children and they were chasing white children across the city and white children kept fleeing them. in tuscaloosa it went from majority white to majority black districts. the fear was if he did not set aside a pocket of mostly white schools, the entire district would turn black and you could not have any integration because you would have no white kids left in the district. but also every time he tried to pass a tax in a majority white town because the city of tuscaloosa was majority white, if you have a majority white town and entirely black school system and try to pass a tax for schools, white parents will not vote for that because their kids are not in the schools. businesses will not support it because their employees they care about do not have kids in the schools. there was this calculation that communities were having to make that we will tolerate some

level of segregation for our poorest most vulnerable black kids in order to keep white kids in the district. i think that was an important story to tell because that is happening in communities across the country. you see it in new york city. middle-class black kids are typically not going -- they are in schools with white kids. it is the poorest most vulnerable kids being segregated. i thought that was important because it talked about the failures of the civil rights movement. the black elite at that point thought they were going to broker -- they understood a judge would release the district from a court order. as soon as it did, the district could do what they wanted to anyway. they figured if they try to negotiate terms, they could get something out of it for the black community which they thought would be economic development. unfortunately, it did not work out that way. they did not get the economic development.

they made the decision and still do not get it. a lot of people in the community believed the black elite sold them out but they could never prove it. i was able to finally get on the record the black judge in the town who basically signed a deal to admit he did it. prof. gessen: one of the difficulties of the stories you are telling is the fact that white people have gotten much better at being -- in the presidential campaign, they have gotten worse at it. they've gotten better at not being such explicit racists so you don't often have the smoking gun of somebody saying the n-word, for example. you have adopted a kind of -- i have heard you describe it almost like the legal definition of what "segregation now" is rather than a kind of narrative definition. could you say something about that?

ms. hannah-jones: what made -- during the civil rights movement, we were dealing with segregation by law. what we are mostly talking about today is called de facto segregation. i think it is a fallacy. the fact though segregation is a term adopted by the north to resist having to come under brown v. board. de facto means segregation by fact but we do not know who caused it. no one is responsible. we cannot say there is a law or government officials that mandated it. that is how most segregation outside of the south was categorized. but i would argue and i think my work i never say to factor or -- jure, ther de segregation today is still the

result of official policy, still the result of official actors. when the school officials in the city of tuscaloosa made the decision to draw the attendance zone that creates 13 years of entirely black high poverty schools, i don't know how you call that anything but intentional segregation. one of the things i talk about a lot with journalists is stop getting so caught up in what you can prove someone was thinking. look at their actions and whether or not they knew what the results of those actions would be. one of the things i say is when exxon mobil has a spill in the gulf, we would never say -- we don't care if the head of exxon mobil hates ducks or not. it does not matter to us how he feels about the environment, whether he likes seagulls or whatever. we only care that there were certain things you should have done and you did not do it, and this is a foreseeable result of that. but when it comes to race, the

only thing that matters is whether we can prove someone hated black people. you could take every possible action, and if we cannot prove you hated black people when you are doing it, suddenly we don't feel like we can report on those actions the way we need to. my work is saying i don't care. i can show you made a decision that you knew would be harmful and you did it anyway and i want , to know why. that is how we need to think about reporting on race. legal discrimination has been outlawed in this country for 50 years. people know how not to do that and write things on paper. but it is not an accident that in every facet of american life, we are still seeing black americans being disadvantaged. that is not accidental or incidental. i think that is how we need to be writing about these issues. prof. gessen: i'm going to ask one more question. if people want to come to the

microphones to ask their own questions, they should start. you had a piece where you described your decision to send your daughter to a high poverty segregated school. did you do that as a journalist? ms. hannah-jones: did i make the decision as a journalist? no. prof. gessen: but it was based on your experience of reporting on this topic? ms. hannah-jones: it is one thing to write about public schools when you do not have kids. it is very different to write about it when you have to make a decision about your own child. i guess i would reframe the question. i made the decision as a mom, as a human being who thinks what we are doing to kids is wrong and understanding by pretending it is only systemic, it allows us to get off the hook about our individual decisions. but clearly all of my years of

reporting informed my decision to enroll my daughter in that school. i remember early on as a new public schools reporter in durham, hearing all of the excuses liberal parents would give about why they would not put their kids in school with poor black kids. i remember one of my earlier stories was about durham tried to use magnet schools to integrate certain schools in poor neighborhoods. they did a survey. a lot of school districts were hyper concerned about what white parents wanted because those were the parents they had to keep in the district. poor black parents would be there, they had nowhere else to go. they did the survey of parents and asked what they wanted in their schools. every single thing the parents said they wanted existed in the magnet schools in the inner-city that could not get white kids. i wrote a story about that. i remember thinking all of these parents think they are good people, they are good people.

they say none of their decisions are about race, but they are willing to tolerate this inequality. throughout the years of my reporting meeting other journalists cataloging racial inequality, when you asked where they live or send their own children to school, they were not living what they were writing. i could not fathom doing that. i like to say i am not judging other people. that probably does not ring true. i probably am judging. for me, it was never a choice. it is hard to say that as a parent that i do not think my daughter deserves more than other kids, but i really don't think she does. i did not test her for talented and gifted. i think she is smart. i do not think she is brilliant. i do not think it matters. as parents, we have gotten to this consumer culture around this thing we say we believe is a great equalizer.

this thing we say is this important institution where it does not matter where you came from, you all come out with the same thing. but then we have turned it into this thing we have to vie for and use our best privilege for to secure every advantage for my child. i fundamentally do not believe in that. i have choice. anything my child does not get in that school, i can give her. but that is not true for all the other kids in my daughter's classroom living in public housing with parents doing the best they can with no resources. yes, the inequality is systemic. but every choice we make is holding up the system. there is no way i could do that. but i also understand and that is what the new york times piece tries to grapple with. that is a hard decision for parents to make. i understand that, too.

when you have so much inequality, to ask a parent to subject their children to that, the very schools i say are not educating kids, that is a big ask. prof. gessen: and how is school so far? ms. hannah-jones: my daughter is a sassy little child who is doing great. she is doing great. that is the thing. for those of us who can get our kids everything, our kids will do great in any environment. that is why we need to stop being so selfish about it. me being in her school changes the entire dynamic of that school. them knowing a "new york times" is a parent at that school changes the dynamic of the school. integration is about power. it is about access to power and who has it and who does not. when you have an entire school where every parent lives in a housing project, we know officials do not care what the parents need. we know there is nothing the parents can do that will get

elected officials to come to weekly meetings about 50 kids not getting their first choice for kindergarten. that is really what integration is about. i think everyone knows that. i think white parents know that. black parents know that. that is why people try to protect their power. i have my power whether my daughter is in that school or not, but i can share that power if i am in that school with those kids. i will try to keep my answers shorter. prof. gessen: i thought that was great. thank you. [applause] >> can you hear me? you did "the problems we all live with."

can you talk about dealing with the education beat, how do you generate access to the families in these neighborhoods and communities that are somewhat closed off in a sense? how do you figure out which is the right person to create that narrative arc within your pieces? ms. hannah-jones: the families are easy. it is getting access to the schools that can be really hard. i find families always want to talk because they know they are being screwed. they know that their kids are not getting the education they deserve. i never have a hard time with the families. it can be really hard to get into the schools. what i have also found is a lot of times, the teachers and principals in the schools also know they are being set up to fail and that you can get access

by talking to people who know them to get them to meet with you and getting access into the schools that way. in terms of the narrative, this is something i struggle with a lot because i am always trying to balance two things. i want to take a kid who is fairly representative, but i am also understanding who i am writing to and i need to pick a kid people think deserves an education. i am very troubled by that. i struggle with that because i think the kid who is a c student coming to school with lots of issues clearly deserves an education, too. but i need to find the kid someone will be outraged about, and they are never outraged about the c black student. they are outraged about alisha, making all a's, doing everything she could possibly do, and is being screwed. i am working on that.

i have a lot of inner turmoil about that and about not being able to write about the typical kid in the schools because i need white people to be outraged so they will do something. typically when i am looking for a student, i'm looking for someone who can articulate what is happening so when i am interviewing them they have given some thought to their circumstance, which a lot of us don't. when i was in school, i remember in tuscaloosa in the black high school, it had no ap classes and the white high school had 20. the school board member when confronted by a student said we should have asked for physics. i'm thinking, what high school kid looks at the course catalog and says there are no classes i want to take, i'm going to ask for what i want. you pick from the classes you are given. i think a lot of times you only

know what you have seen. you don't necessarily know you're getting a bad education. sometimes you do, sometimes you do not. i think most kids do not know. a lot of times it's in poor schools, the parents have not received a good education so they do not know what good instruction looks like. i'm looking for a kid or family who has some sense they are not getting what they are supposed to get so we can talk about that, so i am not just speaking for them but they are able to speak for themselves. that is kind of what i'm looking for. like all of us, we want someone with a compelling narrative who can articulate that narrative, evoke some emotion in the reader or listener. you do that by talking to a lot of people and usually going with your gut on who you have connected with and spending a lot of time with them. i said i was going to answer shorter. that certainly was not shorter. >> hi, my name is tori. like you, i value the historical

background that leads to the greater systemic problems. and i struggle a lot in my own figuring out in journalism how you bring that historical perspective to bear on these problems because i think sometimes in reporting it can seem sort of piecemeal. we are looking at problems very much decontextualized. your work resonates because it has that. not all of us will have the ability to have propublica give us that opportunity, so how do you recommend people who are interested in reporting on these types of issues are able to incorporate that sort of historical and systemic understanding into the work in a compelling way that may have to be a lot shorter? ms. hannah-jones: i was a beat reporter for most of my career, so i did not always have the luxury of a lot of space and time. the first thing i would say is

you have to know the history , yourself if you're going to write about it. i think a lot of times, journalists are not spending the time to figure out the history of the place. i cannot even tell you when i talk to education reporters, have you ever read brown v. board, have you read any of the case law around the school desegregation have you read the , civil rights act, have you read the housing act? a lot of times, you will not write about it if you do not know. when baltimore was on fire, the first thing i am thinking about was the fair housing lawsuit where the city of baltimore, the county of baltimore, and the federal government were sued for intentionally segregating black folks in the inner-city. that gives you mad context for why baltimore is on fire. but if you do not know the history, you are never putting that in the story. it is not necessary you have to spend 3000 words on the history. you have to have some understanding of the history. if you even put three paragraphs in the story, you have given the

reader a lot more context to understand what is happening. to me, the biggest problem is not time and space. it is lack of curiosity amongst reporters to figure out why a place is like it is. this is why i always say as a black reporter, people look at me and think they know what my biases are, they think they know the framework from which i am writing a story. but we do not look at white reporters and have the same assumption. you look at the way reporters cover education. most white reporters are coming from segregated white, public or private schools, that were very high functioning. it would be impossible to imagine the systemic reasons why these other schools are failing when that is your framework. that is the biggest problem, the lack of curiosity about the history, the lack of trying to go out and get the context and understand the context. if you have that, you do not need a lot of space to put it in.

it will also inform how you report all of the stories because we are all building a body of work. it is not ever one story. you are writing multiple stories around this issue. have that context will inform what stories you tell them and what your subsequent stories are. >> thank you.>> thank you. >> thank you for your amazing talk and being so honest with us as well. ms. hannah-jones: i always fear it is going to get me in trouble. >> i love it. my question for you is at a lot , of top universities, is the a -- you see a lot of black students from poor neighborhoods, especially of lower-class. i am just curious, and then you see like students for middle-class homes. have you done research on why this is, and do you believe universities look into family backgrounds when they are looking at black applicants to assess into their schools? ms. hannah-jones: i have lots of thoughts. i worked in college admissions right out of college.