Early life

Lemon was born in 1966 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was educated at Baker High School, a public high school in the small city of Baker in East Baton Rouge Parish. He majored in broadcast journalism at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Louisiana State University. While in college, Lemon worked as a news assistant at WNYW in New York City.

Professional life

In his early career, Lemon reported as a weekend anchor for WBRC in Birmingham, Alabama, and WCAU in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; anchor and investigative reporter for KTVI St. Louis; and anchor for WBRC Birmingham, Alabama.

Lemon reported for NBC News' New York City operations, including working as a correspondent for Today and NBC Nightly News and an anchor on Weekend Today and MSNBC. In 2003, he began at NBC O&O station WMAQ-TV (5 in Chicago), and was a reporter as well as local news co-anchor.

Lemon joined CNN in September 2006. Lemon has been outspoken in his work at CNN, criticizing the state of cable news and questioning the network publicly. He has also voiced strong opinions on ways that the African-American community can improve themselves, which has caused some controversy.

Personal life

During an on-air interview with members of Bishop Eddie Long's congregation in September 2010, Lemon said that he was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, and that it was not until he was thirty years old that he told his mother about it.

In his memoir, Transparent, Lemon came out as gay and discusses colorism in the black community, and the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. He has Creole ancestry (his great-grandfather was of French descent) in addition to Nigerian, Cameroonian, and Congolese ancestry.

Honors and awards

Lemon won an Emmy Award for a special report on the real estate market in Chicago. He received an Edward R. Murrow Award for his coverage of the capture of the D.C. area sniper, and a number of other awards for reports on Hurricane Katrina, and the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Lemon was voted as one of the 150 most influential African-Americans by Ebony magazine in 2009.

Lemon received a DART award as one of the journalists for 2014 from the Columbia Journalism Review, an award given to the worst journalist of the year.

Charities

Don Lemon supports the following charitable cause: Gay Rights.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]