Debbie Elliott
NPR National Correspondent Debbie Elliott can be heard telling stories from her native South. She covers the latest news and politics, and is attuned to the region's rich culture and history.
For more than two decades, Elliott has been one of NPR's top breaking news reporters. She's covered dozens of natural disasters – including hurricanes Andrew, Katrina and Harvey. She reported on the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, introducing NPR listeners to teenage boys orphaned in the disaster, struggling to survive on their own.
Elliott spent months covering the nation's worst man-made environmental disaster, the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, documenting its lingering impact on Gulf coast communities and the complex legal battles that ensued. She launched the series "The Disappearing Coast," which examines the oil spill's lasting imprint on a fragile coastline.
She was honored with a 2018 Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation for crisis coverage, in part for her work covering the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the mass murder of worshippers at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. She was part of NPR's teams covering the mass shootings at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church and the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando.
Elliott has followed national debates over immigration, healthcare, abortion, tobacco, voting rights, welfare reform, same-sex marriage, Confederate monuments, criminal justice and policing in America. She examined the obesity epidemic in Mississippi, a shortage of public defenders in Louisiana, a rise in the incarceration of girls in Florida and chronic inhumane conditions at state prisons in Alabama and Mississippi.
A particular focus for Elliott has been exploring how Americans live through the prism of race, culture and history. Her coverage links lessons from the past to the movement for racial justice in America today.
She's looked at the legacy of landmark civil rights events, including the integration of Little Rock's Central High, the assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the Montgomery bus boycott and the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama. She contributed a four-part series on the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, which earned a 2019 Gracie Award for documentary.
She was present for the re-opening of civil rights era murder cases, covering trials in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, the murder of Hattiesburg, Miss., NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer and the killings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss.
Elliott has profiled key figures in politics and the arts, including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, historian John Hope Franklin, Congressman John Lewis, children's book author Eric Carle, musician Trombone Shorty and former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. She covered the funerals of the Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, and the King of the Blues BB King, and she took listeners along for the second line jazz procession in memory of Fats Domino in New Orleans.
Her stories give a taste of southern culture, from the Nashville hot chicken craze to the traditions of Mardi Gras to the roots of American music at Mississippi's new Grammy Museum. She's highlighted little-known treasures such as North Carolina artist Freeman Vines and his hanging tree guitars, the magical House of Dance and Feathers in New Orleans' Lower 9th ward, a remote Coon Dog Cemetery in north Alabama and the Cajun Christmas tradition of lighting bonfires on the levees of the Mississippi River.
Elliott is a former host of NPR's newsmagazine All Things Considered on the weekends, and is a former Capitol Hill Correspondent. She's an occasional guest host of NPR's news programs and is a contributor to podcasts and live programming.
Elliott was born in Atlanta, grew up in the Memphis area, and is a graduate of the University of Alabama. She lives in south Alabama with her husband, two children and a pet beagle.
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Most people think of New Orleans on Mardi Gras. But the pre-Lenten celebration has roots in another Gulf Coast city. Mobile, Ala., proudly bills itself as the "mother of mystics." -
Court-appointed lawyers say they are too understaffed and underfunded to handle the city's indigent caseload, so there's now a waiting list for felony suspects who can't afford their own lawyer.
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Joe Riley has been mayor of Charleston, S.C. for 40 years. His tenure has seen the transformation of downtown Charleston, and recently, the alleged racially-motivated murders at Emmanuel AME Church. -
Gov. Robert Bentley (R) says the Obama administration is blatantly excluding the states and not providing critical information about refugees needed to protect the health and safety of citizens.
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Steelworkers in Birmingham, Ala., are trying to figure out a new future now that U.S. Steel, one of the last major steel-making operations in the South, has closed.
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The City Council votes to remove four prominent Confederate monuments. The decision comes after four decades of work by activists — and months of heated debate. -
A routine City Council meeting ended with the mayor and a councilman going to the hospital after fisticuffs. It's the latest escalation of a contentious relationship between the mayor and the council. -
"What the Grand Ole Opry did for country music, she has done for Southern food," one writer says of Hach, host of the South's first TV cooking show and a cookbook author and caterer for world leaders. -
The 60th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott is Tuesday. The city remembers the day with a reenactment of Dec. 1, 1955 when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger.
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Sixty years ago Tuesday, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Recruits in Montgomery, Ala., are learning about Parks in a course aimed at eliminating bias in policing.
