Rachel L. Swarns

Rachel L. Swarns (born 1967) is an American author, news correspondent and investigative reporter. Since 1995 at The New York Times, Swarns has been a reporter, news correspondent, and since 2017 a faculty member in journalism at New York University. Swarns has been a foreign correspondent for the Times while reporting from Cuba, Russia and southern Africa (where she was the Johannesburg bureau chief). Swarns wrote American Tapestry about the history of Michelle Obama's ancestors, and co-authored the book Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archives. In 2023, she published The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church.

Background Swarns has discussed her background in an interview. She has also written about her family and religious faith in an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2023. In her column, she describes herself as "a Black woman and practicing Catholic." The piece coincides with the publication of her book on how the Catholic Church in the U.S. was deeply entwined with human bondage. Her mother was an immigrant to the U.S. from the Bahamas, raising her children on Staten Island. Catholic activist Dorothy Day of The Catholic Worker was godmother to one of Swarns's uncles.

Career Before Swarns began working for the New York Times, she worked for the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times).

Swarns did a series of investigative stories in 2016 regarding Georgetown University's connection to slavery, which received nationwide attention. She wrote an investigative series about black professional elites in South Africa, reported on welfare reform policies of Rudy Giuliani, health care, homelessness, racial relations in South Africa, Zimbabwe civil strife, and the Angola civil war.