Nikole Hannah-Jones
At a hotel bar off of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, Nikole Hannah-Jones ordered a shot of bourbon.
The drink had been suggested in a phone call from Susan King, dean of the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones, moments earlier, had been granted tenure by a split vote of the Board of Trustees.
This moment, on June 30, marked the culmination of a monthslong journey that had, once again, placed Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, at the very center of the nation’s polarizing reckoning over race. Hannah-Jones, who is Black, had agreed in February to take an untenured position as Chapel Hill’s Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. This diverted from precedent at Chapel Hill, where all three previous Knight chairs, all of them white, had been tenured.