With Heart

The illustrious career of Yamiche Alcindor (C’09) began with a single story.

She was in high school when she first learned about a Black teen who was abducted, brutally beaten and lynched after being accused of flirting with a white woman in the Jim Crow South.

“I wanted to be a journalist since the moment I learned the story of Emmett Till, who was murdered in 1955 by a racist group of men in Mississippi while he was on a vacation from his home in Chicago,” said Alcindor, who is currently a White House correspondent for NBC News.

Soon after, at 16, she started an internship at The Westside Gazette, an African American newspaper in South Florida, where she learned the basics of the profession from “its caring and intelligent staff,” she said. Over a career spanning more than 20 years, where she has covered everything from presidential campaigns and administrations to the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer shot and killed 19-year-old Michael Brown, Alcindor has experienced firsthand the shift in technologies that bring breaking news to the public. But she’s also experienced what has remained constant.

“Through all of this evolution, the core of journalism has not changed,” she said. “Journalism is about holding powerful people accountable, being fast but accurate and getting to the heart of what the American people want to know about their lives, about their government, about how we are all surviving and thriving in this country.”

For her work, Alcindor has received a bevy of accolades, including a Peabody, the Radio Television Digital News Association’s John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award, the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Gwen Ifill Award, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage.

In addition to covering the second Trump presidency, she’s currently working on a memoir about growing up as the child of immigrants from Haiti, reflecting on the person she wanted to become while still in high school and the struggles she’s endured, and of living her wildest dreams of being a journalist for NBC News.

“It’s been a remarkable experience to be able to put down on paper why I am who I am — and that includes understanding that I am the product of a village of people in my mother and my grandmother, my father, my brother, my husband and now my young son,” Alcindor said. “All of those people have contributed to the way that I see the world and to the way that I report and how I report from the heart. I’m a reporter who is emotional, who feels the stories that I tell, who wants to go out and tell hard truths about America — who wants to cover politics, but who also cares about civil rights.”

It’s a mix that was nourished at Georgetown, where she majored in English and government and minored in African American studies.

“I use my college degree every day as a journalist as I cover politics, race, social justice and the future of democracy,” she told the Class of 2023, while providing the keynote address during commencement. “Be proud. You took classes that taught you about the importance of language, of dialogue and of communication. And you learned about the art of war, studied history and are graduating with a base of knowledge and of truth that will help you wherever you go next.”

For Alcindor, that base of knowledge has helped inform her distinctive voice, shape her unwavering commitment to truth and share the breaking news and stories that define our era.

To read an original Q&A with Alcindor on her experience covering the recent presidential election, writing a memoir and living her wildest dreams, visit college.georgetown.edu/news-story/yamiche-interview.