Lee Hawkins (journalist)

Lee Hawkins, Jr. is an American journalist, musician, author and podcast series creator and host who was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. His journalistic work documents the lives of Black American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow survivors and the intergenerational impact of racial violence and racism on their families. His reporting also addresses people affected by childhood trauma and its long-term effects on health and life expectancy. A versatile journalist, he has reported across media platforms, including print, video, and television, and radio/audio, reporting and conducting on-camera interviews with key newsmakers.

Early life

Hawkins grew up in Maplewood, Minnesota. His father, Lee Hawkins, Sr., is an Alabama native. Hawkins attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was the editorial page editor of the Badger Herald student newspaper, graduating with a degree in political science. As an alumnus, he served a six-year term on the Board of Visitors for the university's School of Journalism & Mass Communications.

While growing up in suburban Maplewood, Hawkins also spent much of his time in the historic, predominantly Black Rondo community in St. Paul, Minnesota. He and his family were active members at the Twin Cities' Mount Olivet Missionary Baptist Church, and Hawkins is still a devout Christian who identifies as "Black Southern Baptist." Still, his "double consciousness" coming-of-age experience was unique, having grown up as part of what he has coined, “The Integration Generation.” As a high school student, he was elected Class President all four years. He was also elected Minnesota's Youth Governor as part of the YMCA Youth in Government program, which includes a week-long mock legislative session held at the state capitol, where students simulate the roles of legislators, lobbyists, and other government officials to experience and understand the workings of state government firsthand. As a youngster, Hawkins was heavily involved in the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. Every year, his family marched with thousands of activists to Minnesota's state capitol to advocate for this cause, refusing to attend school and work on that day. Some of his heaviest influences were the late Rev. Dr. James Battle, Chicago's Rev. Clay Evans, and his Sunday school teacher, Mount Olivet Deaconess Verda Williams. As a teenager, Hawkins started leading the annual MLK birthday marches with dignitaries such as Martin Luther King III and others and received the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from Minnesota’s King Holiday Commission. He credits King's activism and teachings as key factors in his dedication to the principles of nonviolent social change, which particularly influences his journalistic work around corporal punishment in homes and schools and the effects of homicide on children and their families.

He grew up in a musical family. He played in R&B bands and rapped from a young age, balancing his drumming and singing duties on the gospel music scene with his father, a guitarist and vocalist who performed with The Sounds of Blackness and other choirs and groups.

Family and music were inextricably linked. "My dad was a musician and really great singer and guitar player. Unlike many gospel families, we were not discouraged from listening to secular music. So, every day, he played Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Womack, Sam Cooke and all of the greats. So, I had that and also my music, which included hip-hop, R&B, rock.”

The confluence of his Hawkins’ home environs and that of one of his youth’s most influential personalities had its bearing, too. “Because I was a Minnesota kid, I was a big fan of Prince and the Minneapolis sound.” And his "village,” of which Hawkins speaks fondly of often, consisted of “all kinds of notable musicians living all around us."

Hawkins had a close, loving relationship with his father, but Lee Hawkins Sr., whom the younger Lee idolized, was traumatized by his childhood experiences in the Jim Crow South. Hawkins was haunted by the belt lashings his father would give him in Minnesota in the 1970s and '80s. Hawkins told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that his experience with belt whipping as a child made him wonder why so many of the parents he knew who grew up under Jim Crow segregation used the belt against their children.

Hawkins remembers watching the whipping scene from the 1977 miniseries "Roots" with his parents when he was about 5. "And at that very young age, I made the connection: I thought, 'That's what they do to us,' " he said. "It planted the seed of curiosity in my mind about my family's place in America."

Hawkins told the Star Tribune that a DNA genealogy test he took in 2015 sent him on a hunt to find out more about the pain and the power of his ancestors. Building his family tree, often sharing it with his dad, he began to connect the "horror of history" to his own upbringing.

"My father kept secrets from me about his time in Alabama, and his parents kept secrets from him," said Hawkins, who now lives in New York. "It was a dark cloud that always hung over me. I was a Black kid up north who knew I had cousins and connections and cultural traditions that traced back to the South, but I knew nothing about the South."

But racism wasn't confined to the South. Hawkins remembers a neighborhood kid hurling eggs him and his sister, screaming the N-word, as the siblings walked home from school. Black kids who did defend themselves physically were disciplined.

His troubled third-grade teacher, who later died in a murder-suicide at the hands of her husband, never missed an opportunity to call home to report the slightest of behavioral issues. Hawkins suspects she did it because she knew his parents would give him the belt at home.

It was a lot for a child to carry, Hawkins realizes today — the chronic stress of being singled out at school and being beaten at home out of perceived necessity. The love of his parents (despite their complicated relationship with their kids) and the support of elders and other teachers helped mitigate his trauma.

Hawkins says the economic, social, political injustice over generations have led many Black parents to feel that they need to use corporal punishment and allow schools to use corporal punishment against their children "to keep them out of trouble and safe." His work examines the origins of those beliefs and how the whip and the belt used in 17th Century Wales and during American chattel slavery impacted family’s own American experience.

"The immediate tendency is to lash out and condemn the person who questions this," he said. "I'm OK with that, because if there's ever been a time in my life that I've been on the right side of history, it's now."

Journalism career

Hawkins is the author of the forthcoming book, I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free, which will be released by HarperCollins in January 2025. The publisher describes it this way: "Blending the raw power of Natasha Tretheway's Memorial Drive and Clint Smith's insightful How the Word is Passed, veteran former Wall Street Journal writer Lee Hawkins, Jr. exhaustively examines his family's legacy of post-enslavement trauma in a memoir that is soulful, shocking, and spellbinding."

Hawkins is the creator, producer, writer, and host of What Happened in Alabama? a ten-part limited series podcast about the intergenerational ripple effect of Jim Crow segregation on Lee’s family dating back to the 1600s. Hawkins produced the series in partnership with American Public Media's APM Studios.

Hawkins began his career as a business reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal. During this time, he won several awards, including "Best Business Story" from the Milwaukee Press Club, and for an exclusive Journal Sentinel feature, "The Short, Tormented Life of Computer Genius Phil Katz."

Hawkins then spent 19 years as a reporter and news editor for The Wall Street Journal. Hawkins reported from around the U.S. and world and wrote hundreds of stories for all sections of the WSJ, including Page One. Hawkins started his career at WSJ covering General Motors Co. from the Journal’s Detroit bureau. After reporting on GM and the challenges facing America’s “Big Three” automakers, he ventured into on-camera work, representing the WSJ as a correspondent at CNBC, While at CNBC, Hawkins coined the term "NEWBOs", or "New Black Overclass", to describe a younger generation of wealthy and business-savvy African-American celebrities, but it was Hawkins who ran with the idea. In 2009 he presented the CNBC special NEWBOs: The Rise of the New Black Overclass, which profiled LeBron James, Kirk Franklin and Terrell Owens, among others. After WSJ launched its own network in 2009, Hawkins began reporting and conducting interviews for the WSJ website and their sister site WSJ Live. He has interviewed celebrities from the business, sports and entertainment worlds, in many cases for a series of segments titled The Business of Celebrity w/ Lee Hawkins.

In 2017, while still at WSJ, Hawkins was named a 2018 National Fellow by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, supported by the Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being. The fellowship and training inspired Hawkins to begin shifting his career towards researching and covering the long-term effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences, as well as the intergenerational effects of racism, racial violence, and the impact of crimes against humanity and murder on families. His main focus was on Black American descendants of enslavement, survivors of Jim Crow segregation, and their children and grandchildren. More specifically, he began to research the effect of slavery-inspired corporal punishment, homicide, gun violence and the murder survivor experience had on millions of Black families in America, noting that more than 270,000 Black males had been killed since 1980. His reporting and research during the fellowship year centered on internalized racism and America’s history of institutional racial inequality and disparities.

In 2018, Hawkins won the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship from the Carey Institute for Global Good and that he had received a book deal from HarperCollins to write "Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free. The book was described this way: "It is a genealogical investigation of lethal racial violence visited on one family over successive generations, from chattel slavery in 1600s Jamestown, through the 1800s when his ancestors were born into plantation slavery in Alabama, to the present. Lee and his family countered a racist, homicidal culture by embracing education and entrepreneurship to find self-healing and empowerment. Ultimately, “Nobody’s Slave” is the story of one African American family’s triumph over America’s history of racial violence."

Upon his return to WSJ after the writing fellowship, Hawkins continued his interest in researching and reporting on the intergenerational effects of systemic racism, racial violence and childhood trauma. In 2019, Hawkins authored "He Was Going to Change the World," a 4,000-word Page One WSJ story about the tragic death of Devon Wade. Wade was a young rising scholar who overcame a troubled upbringing, with both parents incarcerated for most of his childhood, to become a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University dedicated to helping children affected by parental incarceration. Hawkins detailed how Wade's promising future was cut short by a murder-suicide committed by an estranged former love interest, Mario Williams. The story shed light on the broader issues of Adverse Childhood Experiences and intra-racial homicide faced by young Black men in America, underscoring both the personal tragedy and the enduring impact of Wade's work and aspirations.

In 2020, he began covering the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the one million children enrolled in the New York Public Schools, who were eighty-five percent students of color, many living under the poverty line. He also authored other stories about the history of civil rights, social justice, and the intergenerational effects of racism and racial violence, including several related to the killing of George Floyd. That work included profiles involving the Little Rock Nine and the mothers of Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo. He also wrote about the history of slavery in the Catholic church and academe, detailing how the Jesuits used slavery-based revenue to fund the founding and ongoing operations of Georgetown University and dozens of other colleges, universities, and K-12 schools

Creation of the "What Happened in Alabama?" Podcast Series

In March 2022, it was reported that Hawkins was leaving the WSJ to launch "a podcasting venture around race and equity." A month after leaving WSJ, Hawkins was named a Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of WSJ reporters who did a series on the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Hawkins was the lead reporter on the story, "The Dreams of Jack and Daisy Scott," about the intergenerational effect of the Tulsa Massacre on one Black American family. Shortly after leaving the Wall Street Journal, it was announced that Hawkins had signed a deal to produce his "What Happened in Alabama?" podcast series in partnership with APM Studios, the podcast division of American Public Media (APM), and that he had would also be a 2022-23 O'Brien Fellow for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.

“I think that it’s important that people know that this podcast is not just about trauma,” said Hawkins, who is also the executive producer of “What Happened in Alabama?”. “This is a podcast about how slavery and Jim Crow and the integration experience shaped the trauma in my family through generations, and the self-determination and resilience that we use(d) to respond to it, but also the price we paid through the generations as a result. Among other things, the series looks at the history of his family in America; one that is marked by violence and responses to violence.

He has also been a regular guest on Fox Business Network. In 2024, he appeared on a Juneteenth segment, discussing the complexities of discovering through genealogical research and DNA testing that, in addition to his Black ancestors, he shares DNA with the white enslaver family who enslaved his paternal great-great grandmother, and can trace part of his lineage to Wales.

Awards and Additional Fellowships

Hawkins is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists.and a five-time winner of NABJ's "Salute to Excellence" Award and a recipient of the New York Association of Black Journalists' Adam Clayton Powell Award Outstanding Community and Social Justice Reporting. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His journalistic endeavors are supported by various colleges, universities, and non-profit organizations. In 2023, he was named a 2023-2024 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at The Carter Center. In 2024, he won the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, an initiative of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He also won the 2024 Alicia Patterson Foundation Journalism Fellowship and was named by the AFP trustees as the Josephine Albright Fellow.

Musical career

Hawkins won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the R&B category in 2011 for his song "I Love You Woman". In 2012 he released the album Midnight Conversations, which was featured on an 11-song album produced by R&B producer George Nash Jr. (Earth, Wind & Fire, Jimmy Sommers, Eric Benet).

Hawkins had an on-camera interview with children's music group The Wiggles in 2013 in which he ended up singing with the group. They invited him to sing onstage with them several days later. He then appeared on their 2014 DVD Wiggle House, and was a guest singer (on "This Little Piggy Went to Market") on their 2014 album Apples and Bananas.

In 2015 Hawkins released the Christmas album Songs About the Birth of Jesus, in which he sings with his father.

In 2021, Hawkins produced, arranged, and composed "Gospel Songs by Lee Hawkins (Volume One)," a compilation featuring several gospel recording artists. In rating the project four out of five stars, the Journal of Gospel Music's Bob Marovich referred to the work as "a well-produced" album, with songs "delivered by young and talented artists." Marovich added: "Hawkins’ thoroughly contemporary compositions are unvarying, introspective, serious, lyrical, melodic, and with a hint of classical influence."

"I find that journalism for some reason tends to attract musicians. In the various newsrooms I’ve worked in over the years, I’ve run into a lot of them,” Hawkins told Soul Tracks. “I’ve always been passionate about the art of storytelling in all forms and I’ve never wanted to be one-dimensional. In fact, I’ve always tried to avoid that, to always stay as creative as possible. Writing and broadcasting are both great mediums for telling stories,” he added. “But music, for me, is the most powerful storytelling tool of all."

“I’m the geek always walking around with the big headphones on totally in my own world of soul music. I spend a lot of my free time listening to some of the best R&B singers of all time, so I will never call myself a singer, even though I do sing. I call myself a songwriter/singer as opposed to the reverse. For me, the story is the most important aspect of the song. You don’t have to be the greatest singer, but if you’re inspired by the story, you sing it with emotion, and you connect with your audience that way.”

External links

• Lee Hawkins Twitter feed