Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones, editor of the New York Times‘ 1619 Project, spoke at a union protest outside of the Times building in Midtown Thursday, cheering on fellow employees who walked out after contract negotiations with management broke down.

At least a hundred employees representing the New York Times Guild and other newspaper unions attended the demonstration to demand higher wages, company investment in health-insurance plans, the preservation of pension plans, flexible work location arrangements, and more.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones announced Tuesday that she has declined a tenured professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She made the announcement exclusively on "CBS This Morning" following weeks of controversy surrounding her job status at the university. 

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones on Tuesday announced she has decided to reject an offer to serve as the chair of the journalism department at the University of North Carolina, and that she will take a similar position at Howard University. 

The decision follows a massive controversy at the North Carolina school, which initially did not offer Hannah-Jones tenure.

"It's a very difficult decision, not one I wanted to make," she told Gayle King on "CBS This Morning." 

Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the controversial 1619 Project, declined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's offer for tenure and will instead join the faculty of Howard University.

She announced her decision not to join UNC on Tuesday morning, about a week after the university's board of trustees voted 9-4 to grant her request for tenure after she refused to accept the position without it. The reporter would have been named chairwoman in race and investigative journalism at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Trustees at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill approved tenure Wednesday for Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, capping weeks of tension that began when a board member halted the process over questions about her teaching credentials.

On paper, The New York Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones is a dream hire for the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She won a MacArthur "genius grant" for her reporting on the persistence of segregation in American life. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay accompanying "The 1619 Project," a New York Times Magazine initiative she conceived on the legacy of slavery in the United States. And Hannah-Jones earned a master's degree from the school itself in 2003.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, was denied tenure at the University of North Carolina, her alma mater, by its board of trustees, according to a report by NC Policy Watch.

The board's decision sparked outrage online and from faculty and staff. Some have claimed the board's decision resulted after pressure from conservatives.

The 1619 Project is The New York Times' Pulitzer-winning effort to put racism and slavery at the center of the conversation about American history. The newspaper published a series of articles in August 2019—the 400th anniversary of slavery's introduction to the English colonies in the Americas—that reframed the year 1619 rather than 1776 as the true founding of America.