Author

Jon Jeter

Jon Jeter is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, published author, and award-winning journalist with more than two decades of experience as a foreign correspondent on two continents. A former Washington Post bureau chief who has reported from Africa, South America, and across the United States, Jon has dedicated his career to exposing the economic systems that perpetuate poverty and exploitation throughout the African diaspora.

Jon is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market (W.W. Norton, 2009), a searing examination of how free market policies devastate working-class communities from Johannesburg to Chicago, and co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Wiley & Sons, 2010). He is a recipient of the Knight Fellowship, Stanford University’s highest professional journalism honor, and a former producer for Chicago Public Media’s acclaimed “This American Life.”

Jon's Latest Articles

Seventy-Five Years Ago, Civil Rights Leaders Appealed to the UN for Help in Fighting a Black Genocide in the US. They Were Ignored. Gaza is the Inevitable Result

By ● World ●
In 1951, Black civil rights leaders asked the United Nations to recognize racial violence in America as genocide. The UN’s rejection of their petition 75 years ago exposed the institution’s racial bias and a pattern of political abandonment that still echoes in the world’s response to Palestinians today.

The Killing of Pan-Africanism: The CIA Drew First Blood. AFRICOM Salted the Earth. Africa’s Elites Signed the Sale to Western Capital.

By ● Jon's Africa Column ●
Malcolm called it the ballot or the bullet. The empire answered with coups, and when the coups were done, it sent contracts. Defender Global Correspondent Jon Jeter has watched the sale for twenty-five years, from a Johannesburg corporate suite to an Addis Ababa classroom, and files a dispatch from the deathbed of the dream and the streets that refuse to bury it.

South Africans Are Hunting Immigrants Door to Door With Machetes. It Made Them the Villain of the World Cup.

By ● World Cup 2026 ●
From Nairobi cab stands to Lagos livestreams, Africans who once sheltered the ANC’s revolutionaries are celebrating every defeat of South Africa’s national team, as mobs with machetes hunt immigrants door to door in Johannesburg and Durban to the chant of “abahambe,” they must leave. It is MAGA’s playbook and ICE’s manhunt run on African soil, colonial violence surviving its colonizers.

“More Like a White Man Than a Brother”: As Obama Opens His Monument, Kenya Reckons With His Legacy

By ● World ●
Eleven years ago the streets of Nairobi filled with song for their native son. This Juneteenth, as his $850 million Obama Presidential Center opens on Chicago’s South Side, Kenyans from the slums to the statehouse have reached the same verdict as much of Black America. They expected investment and got AFRICOM. They expected a brother and got a man more loyal to his mother’s country than his father’s.

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