Jelani Cobb
Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.
He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.
Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.
At 10:30pm on July 27th, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appeared before the nation in a televised address. For three consecutive summers, disturbances had engulfed Black urban communities across the country, and 1967 was on pace to be the most violent summer yet, with racial disorders already reported in seventy cities. Johnson appointed the eleven-member Kerner Commission to find out what happened, why it happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. The commissioners would hold twenty days of closed-door hearings in Washington and tour twenty-three riot-torn cities. The resulting report, released seven months later, would offer what was arguably the 20th century’s most unvarnished assessment of American race relations: the fundamental cause of urban unrest, the commission had found, was white racism. The Riot Report will explore the evidence and experiences that led the Commission to its then-shocking conclusions. It is currently scheduled to air in 2024.
