Exclusive | Nikole Hannah-Jones campaigned against a yuppie invasion of kids from whiter areas to failing school they sent daughter

Activist and reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband crusaded against allowing more students from affluent backgrounds into their daughter’s struggling, mostly-black Brooklyn elementary school — while decrying New York’s hopelessly “segregated” public school system, a Post investigation reveals.In a 2016 fight against the “yuppie invasion” of Brooklyn’s PS 307 school, as local reports dubbed it, the Hannah-Joneses stood firmly against a Department of Education rezoning initiative, which seemed poised to flood their kid’s school with local tots from wealthy backgrounds.This despite the couple themselves being well-off non-native New Yorkers living in Bed-Stuy in a completely different school district.At the time, nearby public school PS 8 was overflowing with students, at 148% capacity and had a multi-year waitlist.PS 307 Daniel Hale Williams school, located in Vinegar Hill, was underutilized, at just 50% capacity.The re-zoning plan carved out the gentrified Dumbo neighborhood from PS 8 and assigned it to PS 307 Daniel Hale Williams school in Vinegar Hill.In a Sept.

20 New York Times Magazine story, Hannah-Jones described how she and husband Faraji purposefully sent daughter Najya to a “mostly low-income and Black school” which “wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid” because they thought they could “help improve it for all the children there,” she wrote.Around 90% of PS 307’s students were black at that time.Iowa-born and raised Hannah-Jones chose PS 307, across from a Brooklyn housing project, as a public stand against “segregation,” she claimed.“We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do.

And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same,” she wrote.The re-zoning was designed to do just that.After the local board voted in 2016 to pass the school in...