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,

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