Don Lemon anchors CNN Newsroom during weekend prime-time and serves as a correspondent across CNN/U.S. programming. Based in the network’s New York bureau, Lemon joined CNN in September 2006.
A news veteran of Chicago, Lemon reported from Chicago in the days leading up to the 2008 presidential election, including an interview with then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel on the day he accepted the position of Chief of Staff for President-elect Barack Obama. He also interviewed Anne Cooper, the 106-year old voter President-elect Obama highlighted in his election night acceptance speech after he had seen Lemon’s interview with Cooper on CNN.
Lemon has reported and anchored on-the-scene for CNN from many breaking news stories, including the George Zimmerman trial (2013), the Boston marathon bombing (2013), the Philadelphia building collapse (2013), the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (2012), the Colorado Theater Shooting (2012), the death of Whitney Houston, the Inaugural of the 44th President in Washington, D.C., the death of Michael Jackson (2009), Hurricane Gustav in Louisiana (2008) and the Minneapolis bridge collapse (2007).
Lemon has also anchored the network's breaking news coverage of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Arab Spring, the death of Osama Bin Laden and Joplin tornado. Lemon reported for CNN’s documentary Race and Rage: The Beating of Rodney King, which aired 20 years to the day of the beating. He is also known for holding politicians and public officials accountable in his "No Talking Points" segment.
Lemon joined CNN after serving as a co-anchor for the 5 p.m. newscast for NBC5 News in Chicago. He joined the station in August 2003 as an anchor and reporter after working in New York as a correspondent for NBC News, The Today Show and NBC Nightly News. In addition to his reporting in New York, Lemon worked as an anchor on Weekend Today and on MSNBC. While at NBC, Lemon covered the explosion of Space Shuttle Columbia, SARS in Canada and numerous other stories of national and global importance.
In addition to NBC5 and NBC News, Lemon has served as a weekend anchor and general assignment reporter for WCAU-TV, an NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, an anchor and investigative reporter for KTVI-TV in St. Louis and an anchor for WBRC-TV in Birmingham. He began his career at WNYW in New York City as a news assistant while still in college.
In 2009, Ebony named him as one of the Ebony Power 150: the most influential Blacks in America. He has won an Edward R. Murrow award for his coverage of the capture of the Washington, D.C. snipers. He won an Emmy for a special report on real estate in Chicagoland and various other awards for his reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, he won three more local Emmys for his reporting in Africa and a business feature about Craigslist, an online community.
Lemon serves as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, teaching and participating in curriculum designed around new media. He earned a degree in broadcast journalism from Brooklyn College and also attended Louisiana State University.
@DonLemonCNN
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Tom, as I sat there on CNN on Sunday reporting on the breaking news I felt as though I had been suddenly transported back in time and was reporting from the 1950’s or 60’s.
A man at a Jewish community center on the eve of a Jewish holiday was reportedly heard asking people if they were Jewish before shooting them at close range with a shotgun.
That same man then allegedly got into his car, drove to a Jewish retirement facility and then shot and killed another person before police caught up with him in the parking lot of a nearby elementary school.
As the 73-year old suspect, Frazier Glenn Miller, in handcuffs, sat in the back of the police car, and could be heard yelling “Heil Hitler” at the top of his lungs.
He is a self-professed anti-Semite and white-supremacist.
Miller ran for congress in 2010 as a write-in candidate.
Here’s one of his radio ads challenging white people to stop being so complacent and stand up for white rights, “But you don’t care do you whitey? All you care about is satisfying your belly, pocketbook and genitals and watching the coons play ball on television.”
In the 1980’s he said this about his disgust for integrating the military.
“Simply put the United States Army couldn’t whip their way out of a paper sack in my opinion because of the effects of large numbers of minorities, inferior peoples in our military. And I think that has been intentionally brought about because of the Jewish influence in our government that has forced our leaders to allow large numbers of minorities and blacks in our military.”
That was 1984, the year I graduated high school.
It would not have surprised me back then because the Ku Klux Klan would pass out literature after church on Sunday’s right in front of my high school in Baker, Louisiana.
Fast forward to 2014 and the number of racial hate groups and militias has exploded.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, it’s because of the changing demographics of America and the election of a black president.
The SPLC reports the number of radical anti-government, militia groups increased 150 to 1,274 during the first 4 years of the Obama presidency.
They also say there have been more homegrown domestic terrorism attacks by right-wing groups than by international terrorists during his presidency.
Here’s the bottom line; the more we think we progress the more we regress in racial, anti-minority, religious and ethnic hatred.
We have to be aware and vigilant when we come across people like Frazier Glenn Miller.
He is the founder and former leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party.
Both organizations operated as paramilitary groups in the 1980s.
In plain sight his hatred boiled over, leading him to kill three people, none of whom by the way, turned out to be Jewish.
Now on the internet his white supremacist friends are calling him an idiot because he didn’t kill a Jew.
The irony is too much; idiots with the nerve to call someone else an idiot.
