Columnist Charles Blow To Leave New York Times, Accept Inaugural Langston Hughes Fellowship at Harvard

Author and journalist Charles M. Blow will leave The New York Times and receive the inaugural Langston Hughes fellowship at Harvard, hosted by the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Blow — who is currently a political analyst for MSNBC and a New York Times columnist — wrote in a Harvard press release on Friday that he was “honored and thrilled beyond words” to receive the fellowship, which will begin in the 2025-2026 academic year.

Blow will stay on at MSNBC but leave the Times “in a few weeks,” he wrote in an email to The Crimson. The New York Times announced his departure to staff Friday morning. Along with Paul Krugman and Pamela Paul, Blow is the third Times columnist to declare plans to leave the paper this winter.

In a Friday Instagram post, Blow wrote that he planned to use his time at Harvard to “work on two books that have been tickling my brain.” As a fellow, Blow will receive financial support for his scholarship and help from a research team at Harvard.

Blow, who grew up in rural Louisiana and is now based in Atlanta, Georgia, writes regularly on national politics, race, and LGBTQ rights. He has written two New York Times bestsellers — a memoir titled “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” which argues that Black descendants of those who traveled north in the 20th century during the Great Migration should return south.

Blow has been a regular panelist at the Hutchins Center’s annual forum in Martha’s Vineyard — and has occasionally weighed in on issues facing the University.

When Claudine Gay resigned from the Harvard presidency last January — facing backlash over her congressional testimony on campus antisemitism, and increasingly undermined by plagiarism allegations — Blow described demands for her resignation as a political attack on Black women.

“The campaign against her was never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism,” Blow wrote in his New York Times column. “It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.”

University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs the Hutchins Center, praised Blow’s previous work as a “fearless pursuit of truth and justice.”

“We are thrilled to honor Hughes’ legacy and support the next generation of thought leaders with this fellowship,” Gates wrote in the Friday press release.

A leader in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes was a prominent writer and civil rights activist. He is best known for his innovative poetry, which often mimicked the form of jazz music to faithfully portray the working-class Black experience.

The fellowship will be awarded to scholars and artists who “continue Hughes’ tradition of exploring and illuminating the Black experience in America,” according to the press release.

On Instagram, Blow wrote that his three decades at the Times were a “lifetime.”

“It’s time to start my second lifetime while I’m still young enough — with enough runway left — to make it meaningful,” Blow wrote. “Harvard is the beginning of that!”

—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.