This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism

Don Lemon grew up near Baton Rouge, Louisiana with his parents and two sisters. His older sister, Leisa, helped raise him after his father’s passing. At a young age, Lemon suffered sexual assault by the son of his mother’s friend, an event that Lemon abruptly revealed on camera during an interview about child molestation at a megachurch. After attending Louisiana State University, where a professor told him that he would never make it as a journalist, he graduated from Brooklyn College in New York, majoring in broadcast journalism. He then worked in Chicago news stations before joining CNN in 2006. As a reporter for CNN Tonight and, later, as the show’s host, Lemon anchored much of the network’s coverage of race-related incidents that brought the Black Lives Matter movement into prominence, including the George Zimmerman trial; the Ferguson, Missouri protests; the Charleston church shooting; and the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests of 2020. Lemon wrote a 2011 memoir, Transparent, in which he discussed his youth and came out as gay (“Award-winning CNN Anchor Goes ‘Transparent.’” NPR, 11 July 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137766611/-award-winning-cnn-anchor-goes-transparent. Accessed 23 July 2021).

As someone aware of the constant news cycle, Lemon approaches This Is the Fire with a mixture of hope,