Emmanuel Felton is a journalist whose work examines how race and racism shape American politics and policy. He spent nearly five years as the first race and ethnicity reporter at the Washington Post, where he won a Sidney Award for his reporting on the spread of Stand Your Ground laws. Previously, he was an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News and a senior staff writer at the Hechinger Report, where his investigation into the federal government’s failure to enforce desegregation orders won a James Aronson Award and was a Livingston Award finalist. His first book, “The Search for Black Mecca,” examines the new Great Migration taking hold as millions of Black Americans abandon the communities their parents and grandparents built in the North and West and move to the South. It is set to be published by HarperCollins in January 2027.
He is working on a second book of narrative nonfiction examining what Black Americans gained and lost as they dispersed in the name of opportunity after the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Building on the testimony of older Black Americans who have told him that desegregation was the worst thing that ever happened to the community, the project traces how the unraveling of Black institutions — churches, schools, newspapers, barbershops, political bases — followed integration in neighborhoods that had been shaped by redlining, urban renewal, and disinvestment. Telling the stories of Black families in gentrified urban neighborhoods, inner-ring suburbs, and rural and exurban communities where Black families are now seeking refuge, the book asks whether equality should be measured by access to predominantly white spaces or by the vitality of Black communities themselves.
