The love of reading helped shepherd journalist Jemele Hill through a childhood with two recovering drug addicts as parents in 1980s Detroit. The city was reeling from the scourge of crack and the drain of so-called “white flight” when Hill was a child. It’s in that setting that a young Black girl vowed to make better life choices and used journalism—specifically sports journalism—as her path to stability and security. [Transcript | Video]
In 2023, Jemele Hill is one of the most prominent names in American media for her frank, unflinching observations on sports, race and politics. (You might remember a little Tweet she wrote about the 45th President of the U.S.?) Shortly after the release of her memoir, “Uphill,” she told “Widening the Pipeline” fellows about her early life, her path to sports journalism, and how she was able to unpack her journey into the pages of a book.
5 takeaways:
➀ Hill’s love of words and writing began early. Hill was introduced to the world of sports journalism as a 7-year-old while accompanying her mother Denise on housecleaning jobs in Detroit. One 86–year-old man had a subscription to both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News newspapers. “My job was to be as quiet as possible and to basically be seen and not heard. One way I would entertain myself is by reading the newspapers that he had laying around. I particularly gravitated toward the sports section because I was into sports; I loved watching sports. I was a tomboy. So that taught me, I think, to love newspaper writing in particular.
But her connection to language and communication began even earlier. “My stepfather, he used to read to me on a regular basis. I had a pretty extensive book collection in kindergarten, first grade, second grade. I loved to read. I think reading, the one thing it does is make you curious about the world, and the key component that you have to have, I think, to be an effective journalist is curiosity. That’s what books stoke in you.”
➁ She wasn’t supposed to make it out. Hill says there were so many reasons why she could have easily wound up as a statistic. Her mother’s addiction and profound trauma wove through most of her childhood experiences. Also, “My father and I were estranged for a number of years because as he dealt with and eventually tackled his heroin addiction. Him and my mother were never married and we never lived in the same house,” Hill said. “We were on and off welfare. Between the poverty, the addiction, the extensive sexual abuse trauma that my mother suffered, I was not supposed to come out this way.”
There was also the perpetually negative perception of her hometown to deal with. “We’re talking about the ’80s and early ’90s where the proliferation of crack was everywhere.,” Hill said. “This was a city that often had a much higher unemployment rate than the rest of the nation. Lot of dilapidation, white flight, quite a volatile cocktail that says I’m not somebody who should have gone to college on a academic scholarship, certainly should not have had the career in journalism that I had, certainly with a mother who had me at 18. I should not have been able to escape out of young adulthood without being pregnant and changing the course of my life.”
➂ Having strong women mentors was the first step out. Hill credits veteran sportswriter Johnette Howard, who worked for the Free Press during the 90’s, with inspiring her to pursue sports journalism. Howard wrote impressive long-form profiles and big-picture stories about the sports world and took Hill to her first football practice with the Detroit Lions.
“Just in general, watching how she moved and navigated, the confidence she had, that was very impressionable on me because I was so naïve,” Hill said. “I didn’t know sports was something women weren’t supposed to be doing. I had no idea. The Free Press was extraordinary because they actually had a couple of female sports writers on staff and you just did not see that during that time, not on a consistent basis.”
➃ It’s never too early to build a solid career plan. Knowing how to navigate trends in media and office politics are two valuable career tools, Hill said. “You have to be strategic about the tribe that you build at work. Building mentors, building allies, people, sponsors, as I like to call them, which is a much different relationship than, I think, a mentor. A mentor is a sounding board, the right mentor, obviously, that you can vent, to be frustrated with whatever. But then you have sponsors that you need action from. People who are in rooms that you’re not in that can bring up your name for a challenging assignment, for a certain promotion. You need those people as well.”
Also, it’s important to balance the “voice for the voiceless” aspirations that many journalists have with the bottom line: your career goals. There’s nothing noble about working for free or very little, Hill said. “There is that conditioning that happens that makes you feel, and especially I think it’s more pronounced if you’re a woman, where they try to make it seem as if you’re being aggressive or too ambitious or too demanding if you just want to be able to eat and pay your rent at the same time. They try to make you feel bad about this.”
➄ Book tours are real trips. There’s really no way to prepare for the flurry of activity required, Hill said of promoting her memoir. “This is my first book, so I didn’t really know what to think or how to feel like it would be, but it was definitely very intense. But the book-buying business or book-selling business, rather, is difficult and you have to promote yourself in a very bold way. You’re out there all the time because you got to sling these books. So for me, that part was also a little different. I have a physical product I’m trying to sell, and so everywhere I went, it was just like, “Buy the book, buy the book, buy the book.”
The Widening the Pipeline Fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, Bayer, J&J, Twitter and Lenovo. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
