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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay from ‘The 1619 Project’ wins commentary Pulitzer

Of all the thousands upon thousands of stories and projects produced by American media last year, perhaps the one most-talked about was The New York Times Magazine’s ambitious “The 1619 Project,” which recognized the 400th anniversary of the moment enslaved Africans were first brought to what would become the United States and how it forever changed the country.

It was a phenomenal piece of journalism.

And while the project in its entirety did not make the list of Pulitzer Prize finalists, the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones , the creator of the landmark project, was honored with a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

After the announcement that she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones told the Times’ staff it was “the most important work of my life.”

While nearly impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or even sentences, Hannah-Jones’ essay was introduced with this headline: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote, “But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

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Hannah-Jones’ and “The 1619 Project,” however, were not without controversy. There was criticism of the project, particularly from conservatives. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called it “propaganda.” A commentator for The Federalist tweeted the goal of the project was to “delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry.”

But the most noteworthy criticism came from a group of five historians. ln a letter to the Times , they wrote that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” They added, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”

Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor Elliot Kaufman wrote a column with the subhead: “The New York Times tries to rewrite U.S. history, but its falsehoods are exposed by surprising sources.”

In a rare move, the Times responded to the criticism with its own response . New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein wrote, “Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”

That was just a portion of the rather lengthy and stern, but respectful response defending the project.

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In the end, the 1619 Project — and Hannah-Jones’ essay, in particular — will be remembered for one of the most impactful and thought-provoking pieces on race, slavery and its impact on America that we’ve ever seen.

And maybe there was another reason for the pushback besides those questioning its historical accuracy.

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in December , “U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place ‘the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.’ Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.”

There’s no question that Hannah-Jones’ essay, which requires the kind of smart thinking and discussion that this country needs to continue having, deserved to be recognized with a Pulitzer as the top commentary of 2019. After all, and this is not hyperbole, it’s one of the most important essays ever.

In addition, we should acknowledge the other two finalists in this category: Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins and Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez.

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Jenkins continues to be among the best sports columnists in the country. Meanwhile, has any writer done more to shine a light on homelessness than Lopez? This is the third time in the past four years (and fourth time overall) that Lopez has been a finalist in the commentary category.

In any other year, both would be deserving of Pulitzer Prizes. But 2019 will be remembered for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ powerful essay and project.

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The New 1619 Project

The book version of the famed (and reviled) magazine issue is much longer, easier to read, and changed in canny ways that will help it endure..

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project arrived in August 2019—somehow, barely more than two years ago—and created a discourse that nearly obscured the thing itself. That discourse has, in its third year of life, produced an exceedingly lumpy grab-bag of cultural byproducts: mentions in state, local, and federal bills aimed at prohibiting the project’s teaching in schools; response interviews with prestigious, 1619-critical historians on the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site (?); an unusually lively debate between two historians of the founding era at the Massachusetts Historical Society; and, recently, a lengthy essay explaining the project’s origins, and locating it within centuries of American historiography, from Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein. The discourse draped the project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, already a respected journalist, with all of its prizes ; the discourse also made her presence on college and high-school campuses into a culture-war issue.

All of this is so highly unusual when it comes to the reception of historical media that I’m hard-pressed to think of an analog. Most authors of historical books and filmmakers with new history documentaries only wish . As William Hogeland wrote for Slate recently , the 1619 Project spurred such reaction in part because of its message, which disturbed the kind of people who have severe and untreated addictions to founding fathers, but in part because of the way the place and manner of its publication collapsed every context: academia, legacy media, social media, education, politics. “One random summer Sunday, the New York Times Magazine, of all things, unveiled for its big, middlebrow reading public what seemed to be a wholesale reframing of the nation’s entire history,” is how Hogeland put it.

The ideas in 1619, many of which are pretty familiar to anyone who’s followed academic history in the past few decades, may have landed the way they did because of the Times’ platform and unique cultural position. But this was a tremendous act of synthesis and translation on Hannah-Jones and the Times’ part. A prestigious paper assigned fiction and non-fiction pieces about ideas that had evolved within the academy to excellent writers, packaged everything up, gave it a beautiful art treatment, and called it a “project.” Not a book, not a museum exhibit, not a podcast—a project, one that had a very easy-to-remember elevator pitch: “Not 1776—1619.”

This frame, it turns out, was brilliant: sticky, provocative, generative. The discourse has proved it. Now the project has become a book: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story . With this, the editors (Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Silverstein) have tried to address many of the critiques leveled at the project when it was still a magazine special issue—a past iteration that Silverstein, in his recent contextualizing essay, called a “first effort.” The new book is much, much longer than the magazine version, and easier to read, despite its heft. Timeline pages provide a necessary chronological anchor for the essays, which move backward and forward in time. The magazine issue had some timeline elements, but in the book the cards have proliferated, with many new key events added: the Virginia House of Burgesses’ passage of the law that established the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem , 1662; Lord Dunmore’s proclamation , 1775; the first gathering of Black activists that would become known as the Colored Conventions , 1830.

Poetry and fiction runs throughout the book and is inspired by the events in the timeline cards, providing more grounding in the “dates and names” of the history—a neat trick, given the essays’ thematic nature;  it might otherwise be easy to get lost. The magazine’s shorter sidebar essays appear to have been cut, or, in some cases, absorbed or adapted into the longer essays, which makes things much more pleasingly symmetrical. There are seven new thematic essays in the book, bringing the total number to 17, and 19 new works of fiction and poetry, making 36.

Here’s the sentence from Hannah-Jones’ opening essay that caused the most sturm und drang among historians after the magazine’s publication: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” A few months after the publication of the magazine’s special issue, after staunch protest from some leading lights of the historical profession, those independence-declaring colonists acquired a qualifying prefix (“some of”) in the digital version of the essay. That change carries over to the book, as noted and explained by Hannah-Jones in the book’s introduction. More additions to this second version include added context about slavery in other parts of the Americas, explorations of how the Haitian Revolution affected American slaveholders, and what Hannah-Jones called “more nuance” on Abraham Lincoln’s views on race, added to her opening essay.

Of the additions, I most loved the essay on “Dispossession,” a history of the overlap between Native and Black oppression, by Tiya Miles. Miles had two short pieces in the magazine issue, and is one of my favorite writers, whose recent book on “Ashley’s Sack” left me weak . (The fact that Ashley and her sack don’t appear in this new book just shows that the 1619 Project, even in its expanded form, is only ever going to be a portal to the many other histories, micro- and macro-, of American slavery that scholars have produced over the past few decades.) An essay on “Church” by Anthea Butler, which opens with Barack Obama’s betrayal of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, goes back in time, and moves forward to Rev. Raphael Warnock’s election to the Senate in 2021, brings critical context to the story of Black resistance to white supremacy (a story that is, in general, greatly amplified in the new 1619 Project). A piece of short fiction by Darryl Pinckney about the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation on Union-occupied Port Royal Island in South Carolina, which the author has expanded from its even shorter form in the magazine, should probably be a movie. Jamelle Bouie’s essay on democracy, from the magazine, here found in a section retitled “Politics,” has been wrapped in new 2020 context that only shows just how right he was to call out the reactionary strain in American politics that perceives only certain (white, property-owning) voters to be legitimate.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

By Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times Magazine. One World.

If I have a quibble with this mosaic of a book, which achieves the impossible on so many levels—moving from argument to fiction to argument, from theme to theme, and backward and forward in time, so smoothly—it’s the amount of 2020 in it. Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander’s essay on “Fear,” new to the book, starts with George Floyd and rolls back through the reactions white Americans had to events like the Haitian Revolution, the insurrection of Nat Turner, Black voting during Reconstruction, and the upswelling of Black civil rights activism in the middle of the 20th century. It ends on a hopeful note, with the protests of 2020. “Perhaps our nation is finally beginning to face our history,” they muse. As the authors closed this work, they couldn’t have known what 2021 would bring—how completely moderate Democrats would torpedo police reform , how “anti-CRT” would take hold as a new code for racist backlash, how even the reception to the project itself would come to suggest a nation that will do anything not to face its history.

But if The 1619 Project —the product of so many minds thinking in so many directions—has any overarching argument, it’s that things don’t change in a linear way. The next edition will, I’m sure, find a way to explain.

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The 1619 project details the legacy of slavery in america.

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Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in the Virginia colony. To observe the anniversary of American slavery, The New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project to reframe America’s history through the lens of slavery. The project lead, reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Hari Sreenivasan:

Today, the New York Times published the print edition of the 1619 Project. The name marks this month's 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved people brought from Africa to the then-Virginia colony. The Times says the project aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. The project is led by New York Times magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is the author of the opening essay. She joins me now.

You have been working on this for a number of years, but you put this together very quickly. First of all, why? Why this topic? Why this issue?

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Well, you don't have very many opportunities to ever celebrate the 400th anniversary of anything, and it seemed to me that this was a great opportunity to really, as you said in your opening, reframe the way that we have thought about an institution that has impacted almost everything in modern American society, but that we're taught very little about, that we're often taught is marginal to the American story. And we wanted to do something different. We wanted to use the platform of The Times to force us to confront the reality of what slavery has meant for our development as a nation.

And this isn't just about sort of the kind of textbook ideas of what happened to slaves. You've got essays in here about health care, about geography, about sugar, about music, all of these different ripple effects that happened throughout the economy and really life here. You said — in a sentence, you said, you know we would not be the United States were it not for slavery. This is kind of one of the original fibers that made this country.

Absolutely. The conceit of the magazine is that one of things we hear all the time is, well that was in the past; why do you have to keep talking about the past? Well, one, I think the past is clearly instructive for the future, for how we are right now, but also the conceit of the magazine is that you can look at all of these modern phenomenon that you think are unrelated to slavery at all and we are going to show you how they are. And so we have a story in there about traffic patterns. We have a story about why we're the only Western industrial country without universal health care, about why Americans consume so much sugar, about capitalism, about democracy. We're really trying to change the way that Americans are thinking that this was just a problem of the past that we've resolved and show that it isn't. What many people don't know, and I point this out in my essay, is that one of the reasons we even decide to become a nation in the first place is over the issue of slavery and had we not had slavery we might be Canada. That one of the reasons that the founders wanted to break off from Britain is they were afraid that Britain was going to begin regulating slavery and maybe even moving towards abolishment. And we were making so much money off of slavery that the founders wanted to be able to continue it.

We're not taught that when we're taught about our origin stories, and not knowing that then it really does not allow us to grapple with a nation that we really are and not just the nation that we're taught in kind of American mythology.

And that money ends up fueling so much more of what made this country.

Of course. It's not incidental that 10 of the first 12 presidents of the United States were slaveowners. This is where, at that time, this kind of very burgeoning nation was getting so much of its wealth and its power. It's what allows this kind of ragged group of colonists to believe that they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world at that time. And it went everywhere. It was north and south. We talk about the industrial revolution — where do Americans believe that the cotton that was being spun in those textile mills was coming from, was coming from enslaved people who are growing that cotton in the south. The rum industry, which was really the currency of the slave trade, that rum was being processed and sold in the United States. The banking industry that rises in New York City is rising largely to provide the mortgages and insurance policies and to finance the slave trade. The shipbuilders are northern shipbuilders. The people who are sending voyages to Africa to bring enslaved people here are all in the north. So this is a truly national enterprise but we prefer to think that it was just some backward Southerners, because that is the way that we can kind of deal with our fundamental paradox that at our beginning that we were a nation built on both the inalienable rights of man and also a nation built on bondage.

And you even talked about Wall Street's name comes from something that most of us don't recognize.

Absolutely. So Wall Street is called Wall Street because it was on that wall that enslaved people were bought and sold. That's been completely erased from our national memory and completely erased from the way that we think about the North. At the time of the Civil War, New York City's mayor actually threatened to secede from the union with the South because so much money was being made off of slave-produced cotton that was being exported out of New York City. It is that erasure I think that has prevented us from really grappling with our history and so much in modern society that we see that is still related to that.

You know, one of the essays in here about health care, which is fascinating, is that some of the myths that started then are still perpetuated today in modern health care and that there are still gross misunderstandings that could actually have very serious health consequences.

Absolutely. So Linda Villarosa has this compelling essay that talks about how during slavery enslavers were using enslaved people to do these medical experiments, but also we were using medical technology to justify slavery by saying enslaved people don't feel pain the way, or people of African descent don't feel pain the way that white people do, that they have thicker skin. And so you can beat them or torture them and it's not going to hurt as bad. Well, these are all justifications for slavery, but if you look at modern medical science, in our understanding they're still using these calculations that say, for instance, lung capacity was one of the things that Linda writes about, that black people have worse lung capacity. And the reason enslavers said that was they said that working in the fields and doing this hard labor was good for black people because it helped them increase their lung capacity. Well, what Linda points out is today doctors and medical science are still accounting for what they think is a lessened lung capacity of black Americans and it's simply not true. But we've never purged ourselves of that false science that was used to justify racism.

You talked about how basically that the black American or there's the black experience has been inconvenient to the narrative of this nation in all of these different categories, that it's been something that we have struggled to deal with but oftentimes just not dealt with it as a result that it was thorny.

Absolutely. So when you think about the story of who we are, that we are this country built on individual rights. We are the country where, if you are coming from a place where you are not free, you can come to our shores and you can get freedom. Well then you have black people. And every time you look at black Americans, you have to be reminded that there was one-fifth of our population who, we had no rights, no liberties, no freedom whatsoever. We are the constant reminder of really the lie at our origins that while Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence his enslaved brother-in-law was there to serve him and make sure that he's comfortable. So I think this explains a lot the continued perception that black people are a problem, that black people are as Abraham Lincoln said "a troublesome presence" in American democracy because every time you see us you have to be reminded of our original sin, and no one wants to be reminded of sin. We're ashamed of sin.

You know, one of the things that you mentioned a couple of nights ago when this project launched is the story of your grandmother who grew up a sharecropper. And here you are today. She didn't live to be able to see this magazine, but I'm assuming she'd be proud.

Yeah, I think she would. My grandmother died when I was still in college, and she would be astounded to see what I became. And I think that that's an important part of this story. We hear all the time what people consider the problems of the quote-unquote "black community" and people like to point out statistics that they think are indicative of black failure. But when we think that, as I point out in the magazine, I'm part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of this country who was born into a country where it was not legal to discriminate against me just because I descended from people from Africa. We've made tremendous progress in a very short period of time. Really just one or two generations out of legal Jim Crow, you could have someone like me at the New York Times producing this work. And it really is a story of black ascension once the legal barriers have been removed.

You talk in eloquent terms about how black people really are the perfecters of this democracy, that we had these original documents but really it took this all the way almost to the civil rights struggle for us to start seeing what those words actually meant.

Absolutely. What I argue is that no one values freedom more than those who never had it. And so while the founders were writing these lofty and aspirational words, even as they knew that they were going to continue a system of slavery, black people had no choice but to believe in the literal interpretation of those words, that all men are created equal and are born with inalienable rights. And so black people really from the moment we landed on these shores have been resisting and trying to push this society toward a more equal society of universal rights. And that has really been our role. You can look at the fact that black people have fought in every single war this country has ever fought, but we've also engaged in a 250-year internal war against our own country to try to force our country to also bring full democracy here and not just abroad.

This magazine is also showing up in 2019 in a climate where at this point all you have to do is just look at your Twitter feed, look at the hashtag, and you see people who have an incredibly different narrative that they believe very strongly, that they'd look at this magazine, The Times, everything else as part of a larger propaganda campaign, this is part of a conspiracy, etc. How do you deal with that?

There's two things that I would say to that. Every piece in here is deeply researched. It is backed up by historical evidence. Our fact checkers went back to panels of historians and had them go through every single argument and every single fact that is in here. So it's really not something that you can dispute with facts. But the other thing is if we truly understand that black people are fully American and so the struggle of black people to make our union actually reflect its values is not a negative thing against the country, because we are citizens who are working to make this country better for all Americans. That is something that white Americans, if they really believe as they say that race doesn't matter, we're all Americans, should also be proud of and embrace that story. We cannot deny our past. And if you believe that 1776 matters, if you believe that our Constitution still matters, then you also have to understand that the legacy of slavery still matters and you can't pick and choose what parts of history we think are important and which ones aren't. They all are important. And that narrative that is inclusive and honest even if it's painful is the only way that we can understand our times now and the only way we can move forward. I think what, if people read for instance a story on why we don't have universal health care, what it shows is that racism doesn't just hurt black people but there are a lot — there are millions of white people in this country who are dying, who are sick, who are unable to pay their medical bills because we can't get past the legacy of slavery. This affects all Americans no matter if you just got here yesterday, if your family's been here 200 years, no matter what your race. Our inability to deal with this original sin is hurting all of us and this entire country is not the country that it could be because of it.

So just connect that dot. What is the connection between universal health care and slavery?

Well, what we know is that white support for universal programs declines if they think that large numbers of black people are going to benefit from it. And this is a sentiment that goes all the way back to right after the end of the Civil War when the Freedmen's Bureau starts to offer universal health care for people who had literally just come out of bondage, had not a dollar to their name, had no way to live, had nothing. And white people immediately pushed back against that believing that even people who had just come out of slavery should not get anything quote-unquote "for free," even though their labor clearly had built the entire, most of the economy of the country. And so that sentiment continues to this day. And if you look at across western industrialized nations, European nations, we have the stingiest social safety net of all of those nations. And it's because we are the only one on whose land we practiced slavery. So our inability to get past that is hurting. It's not just in terms of universal health care, but you can look at why we don't have universal child care, why we have the stingiest parental leave, why we have the lowest ability to have people represented by unions. All of this goes back to the sentiment that if black people are going to benefit, white Americans would not support it, large numbers of white Americans.

So this is the actual physical edition that a lot of people in the country might not be able to get if they don't have a newsstand that sells the New York Times. But it's also all of it is online, right?

All the essays are online and this was a special section. This was in partnership with the Smithsonian, right?

And so you've got curriculum that's online, you've got all of the New York Times Magazine that's online. You're doing a lot of different kinds of outreach projects. Right after this you're going to a 1619 brunch and this is happening in different parts of the country as well?

Yes. So people all across the country are holding brunches to really sit and discuss this, which is more than my wildest dreams for this project. I think just because of what's happening in the country right now, people are really searching for answers. We raised money so that we could print more than 200,000 additional copies that we are distributing in various places across the country for free because we really want not just Times subscribers to get access to this but communities where it's difficult to get the Times, where people can't afford to get the Times. We truly think that this is a public service project that is important for all Americans, not just our subscribers to get access to.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, thank you so much.

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The 1619 Project

93 pages • 3 hours read

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-18

Key Figures

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Essay Topics

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Summary and Study Guide

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is an anthology curated by Nikole Hannah-Jones that provides a new perspective on American history. Hannah-Jones and the authors in this work challenge conventional teachings of American history, often offered only through a white lens. Using historical record, essays, fiction, and poetry, the authors of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story present a new understanding of the American identity, one that has been forged by the contributions, labor, and intellectualism of the country’s Black citizens. This book represents the culmination of an original issue of The New York Times Magazine commemorating the arrival of enslaved Africans to American shores in 1619. Since the issue’s publication, The 1619 Project has expanded, including a television mini-series, podcasts, and school curriculum. Nikole Hannah-Jones is the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story was named one of the ten greatest works of journalism between 2010-2019 by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

This guide refers to the 2021 hardback edition by The New York Times Company.

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Content Warning: The source material contains graphic descriptions of slavery, physical and sexual abuse, sexual assault, and murder. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story also covers historical resources that may use outdated or racist language. This guide reproduces this language only when using direct quotations.

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Using essays, fiction, and poetry, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story reframes American history in a new light, challenging pervasive white, colonial perspectives. The project began when Hannah-Jones encountered the title date as a teenager, learning that a ship called the White Lion brought enslaved Africans to the Virginia Colony, long before the nation’s founders ever signed the Declaration of Independence. Hannah-Jones realized that American slavery was a part of the foundation of American life. The work expands upon this idea by examining the motivations and nuances of important historical events.

Each chapter explores a different aspect of slavery’s impact on American structures and institutions and connects historical events with contemporary issues. The essays are accompanied by short vignettes, providing brief details about important historical events and acts of resistance by Black Americans and enslaved Africans, as well as poems that help to contextualize the experiences of those living during these historic moments.

In the Preface-Chapter 4, the authors examine the early days of slavery and its connection to the American Revolution , sugar, and democracy. Chapter 1 connects slavery and democracy, arguing that Black Americans have contributed to advancements in equality and democracy. Chapter 2 uncovers the origin of the idea of “race” and how it was developed by enslavers to ensure the longevity of slavery. In Chapter 3, author Khalil Gibran Muhammad details how sugar production created the justification for slavery and gave birth to American capitalism. Chapter 4 examines the prevalence of white fear in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Chapters 5-9 spotlight dispossession, capitalism, politics, citizenship, and self-defense. Chapter 5 details the relationship between Black and Indigenous people in the United States throughout history and juxtaposes their status and treatment within American policies. In Chapter 6, Matthew Desmond contends that slavery defined the nation’s extreme adherence to capitalism and created a model for oppression and wealth advancement. Chapter 7 analyzes the connection between slavery and the structure of the US government and political policies. In Chapter 8, Martha S. Jones draws attention to the efforts of Black Americans to redesign the meaning of citizenship.

Chapters 10-14 unpack other forms of disparity and activism in US history. Chapter 10 traces the link between the violent control and punishment during slavery to the modern incarceration system. Chapter 11 elucidates the false promise of Reconstruction , examining the many ways in which Black citizens were denied rights following Emancipation. In Chapter 12, Linda Villarosa focuses on the historical relationship between Black people and the American healthcare system. Chapter 13 spotlights the interconnectedness of Black churches and activism, and Chapter 14 focuses on the development of Black music in popular American culture.

Chapters 15-18 identify more issues of racial discrimination and their connection to slavery while providing a roadmap for America’s future. In Chapter 15, Interlandi details the backlash to the Affordable Care Act in 2008 and connects it to earlier efforts by emancipated enslaved people to develop systems of healthcare. Chapter 16 exposes how problems with transportation and infrastructure are rooted in segregationist efforts following the Civil War. Ibram X. Kendi challenges the idea of continued progress and advocates for persistence and diligence in Chapter 17, while Nikole Hannah-Jones outlines a roadmap for justice in Chapter 18.

As each chapter analyzes American history and the relationship between slavery and various American institutions and ideologies, the authors also lift up Black voices and acts of Black resistance that informed the American identity and culture.

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From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That

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From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That, The American Historical Review , Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa041

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On Thanksgiving Day, I trekked up the highest hill in Brooklyn, the peak of which happens to be the site of a Civil War memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery. Two things struck me about the inscription on the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument, which was erected in 1869. The first was that an astounding 148,000 residents of New York City (17 percent of the city’s 1860 population) served in the Union’s military forces during the Civil War. The second was the statement that they did so to defend the Union and preserve the Constitution. The inscription contains not a word about slavery or emancipation, let alone black military service.

I really did not want to devote this column to the recent dispute between the New York Times and the handful of prominent historians who have offered sharp criticism of that publication’s purportedly revisionist narrative of the American story—the 1619 Project—that puts racism and the struggle for black liberation at the core of the national experience. But of course, it was all anyone asked me about at the AHA’s Annual Meeting during the first week of January, so I feel I must.

By now, most historians are familiar with the basic contours of this public scuffle between journalists and members of our profession. In mid-August, with much fanfare, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the 1619 Project. Spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project is designed, in Times editor Jake Silverstein’s words, to impart the idea that “the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world,” was not 1776, but rather “late August of 1619,” when the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shore of what would eventually become the Commonwealth of Virginia. Naturally—and entirely appropriately—this was as much a media event as a considered historiographic intervention. The “reframing” of the country’s “origins” was a rhetorical move, one that impressed upon a wider public an interpretive framework that many historians probably already accept—namely, that slavery and racism lie at the root of “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” The aim, Silverstein observed, was to “place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” 1 If some historians might quibble with this or that specific conclusion drawn from such an approach, the overall reorientation strikes me as laudable, if unexceptional.

In fact, many scholars initially greeted 1619 with excitement and effusive praise. In part, I suspect that this was because the basic impulse behind the collection of eighteen articles and many additional short essays—by journalists, historians, sociologists, poets, legal scholars, English professors, artists, playwrights, and novelists—reflects how many, if not most, American historians already teach about that past in the undergraduate classroom. Speaking for myself, for three decades now I have emphasized in my U.S. survey class that the African American experience must be considered central to every aspect of American history. You cannot understand anything about the latter, I inform my students, unless you incorporate the former into the narrative. Yes, that includes the Revolution and the founding of the nation. It includes, obviously, the reason the first republic and its Constitution, so revered, lasted about as long as the USSR, a mere seventy-four years, before dissolving into the bloodiest conflict of the nineteenth century. For my part, I always considered this a pretty weak foundation on which to erect unconditional veneration. As Eric Foner argues in his newest book, The Second Founding , the creation of the new republic and a transformed Constitution after the Civil War were inseparable from the black freedom struggle. 2 Foner’s argument is elegantly made, but I have long assumed that the case he makes was a given among nearly all American historians. The contours of the twentieth century’s modern political economy, constructed by the New Deal (and the reaction against it), have long required an understanding of the enduring legacy of white supremacy and the subsequent struggle to destroy (or reconfigure) the racial order. Again, these strike me as unremarkable points among historians today; the 1619 Project merely seeks to consolidate these arguments and invites a wider audience to reckon with them. And it does so in the tradition of the time-honored, and sometimes uncritical, practice of recognizing significant anniversary dates, for better or for worse. This year we will get the Pilgrims, which should bring its own media spectacle. 3

So why the hostile, if somewhat belated, reaction? Here I admit to being perplexed—hence my initial hesitation to wade into the debate. The initial caveats came from an unlikely precinct, at least for a mainstream public intellectual knock-down, drag-out. In early September, the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fired a broadside at the Times , denouncing the 1619 Project as “a politically motivated falsification of history” designed, in their view, to bolster the Democratic Party’s alignment with “identity politics” at the expense of any serious engagement with class inequality. This attack came not from the expected quarters of the right , which one imagines would find offensive and unpatriotic the denigration of the American promise as irredeemably racist, but from the Trotskyist left. As good Marxists, the adherents of the Fourth International denounced the project for its “idealism,” that is to say, its tendency to reduce historical causation to “a supra-historical emotional impulse.” By mischaracterizing anti-black racism as an irreducible element built into the “DNA” of the nation and its white citizens, the Trotskyists declared, the 1619 Project is ahistorical and “irrationalist.” This idealist fallacy requires that racism “must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions,” naturally the very thing that any materialist historian would want to attend to. “The invocation of white racism,” they proclaim, “takes the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political and social history of the country.” Perhaps even worse, “the 1619 Project says nothing about the event that had the greatest impact on the social condition of African-Americans—the Russian Revolution of 1917.” 4 (Well, OK, I was with them up to that point.) In some ways, the debate merely reprises one fought out nearly half a century ago: Which came first, racism or slavery? Who is right, Winthrop Jordan or Edmund Morgan? 5

But that, it turns out, was merely the opening salvo. In October and November, the ICFI began to post a series of interviews with historians about the 1619 Project on its “World Socialist Web Site,” including (as of January 11) Victoria Bynum (October 30), James McPherson (November 14), James Oakes (November 18), Gordon Wood (November 28), Dolores Janiewski (December 23), and Richard Carwardine (December 31). 6 As many critics hastened to note, all of these historians are white. In principle, of course, that should do nothing to invalidate their views. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar choice on the part of the Trotskyist left, since there are undoubtedly African American historians—Marxist and non-Marxist alike—sympathetic to their views. Barbara Fields comes immediately to mind, as she has often made similarly critical appraisals of idealist fallacies about the history of “race” and racism. 7

If these scholars all concern themselves in one way or another with historical dilemmas of race and class, they hardly are cut from the same cloth. Bynum, best known for her attention to glimmers of anti-slavery sentiment among southern whites, some of which was driven by class grievances, doesn’t always take the Trotskyists’ bait. For example, she points out that “we cannot assume that individual [southern] Unionists were anti-slavery,” even if they “at the very least connected slavery to their own economic plight in the Civil War era.” Similarly, McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, acknowledges in his interview that initially most Union Army soldiers fought to “revenge an attack on the flag.” (As the Green-Wood memorial indicates, that’s how many chose to remember it as well.) Still, McPherson complains that the 1619 Project consists of “a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lack[s] context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.” Yet it is safe to say that he would not sign on to the Marxist version of the Civil War preferred by the ICFI—“the greatest expropriation of private property in world history, not equaled until the Russian Revolution in 1917.” 8

McPherson insists in his interview that “opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.” Sure, but it wouldn’t be difficult to find a dozen historians who could say, with confidence, yes, but on balance, slavery and racism themselves have probably been just as, if not more, important. In his interview, Oakes, one of the most sophisticated historians of the rise of the nineteenth-century Republican Party and its complex place within an emergent anti-slavery coalition, offers a bracing critique of the recent literature on slavery and capitalism, scholarship that underpins sociologist Matthew Desmond’s contribution to 1619. But other than gamely defending Lincoln against the charge of racism, Oakes doesn’t really direct much fire at the 1619 Project in particular. For his part, Wood (described by the Trotskyists as “ the leading historian of the American Revolution”) seems affronted mostly by the failure of the 1619 Project to solicit his advice, and appears offended by the suggestion that the Revolutionary generation might have had some interest in protecting slavery. Yet, oddly enough, even he seems to endorse what has become one of the project’s most controversial assertions—that “[Lord] Dunmore’s proclamation in 1775, which promised the slaves freedom if they joined the Crown’s cause, provoked many hesitant Virginia planters to become patriots.” Those are Wood’s words, and they are part of his wide-ranging and fascinating discussion of the place of anti-slavery and pro-slavery sentiment in the Revolutionary era and the Revolutionary Atlantic World more generally.

Taken as a whole, the interviews are of enormous interest, but more for what they have to say about these scholars’ own interpretations of key aspects of American history than as a full-on attack on the 1619 Project. Reading closely, one sees the interviewed historians trying to avoid saying what the Trotskyists would like them to say, offering a far more nuanced view of the past. This certainly entails dissent from some of the specific claims of 1619, but it hardly requires them to embrace fully the Trotskyist alternative, which I suspect at least several of them would be reluctant to do. Frankly, I wish the AHR had published these interviews, and I hope they get wide circulation. Not for the critique of the 1619 Project itself, but because collectively they insist on the significance of historical context, the careful weighing of evidence, the necessity of understanding change over time, and the potential dangers of reductionism. I would urge anyone to read them.

I have focused on the interviews with Bynum, McPherson, Oakes, and Wood because these four scholars became the protagonists in the subsequent, and far less enlightening, act of the drama. On December 20, the New York Times Magazine published a letter to the editor circulated by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and signed by these four interviewees, “to express [their] strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” 9 In particular, the letter objected to “the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” This was followed by a spirited rebuttal from Times editor Jake Silverstein, and then rapidly spiraling coverage in the Atlantic , the Washington Post , and elsewhere, including follow-ups on the WSWS. More than a few people have asked me if perhaps the Times didn’t invite the historians’ letter, as it has certainly put a second wind in the 1619 Project’s media sails. No doubt, the Trotskyists who lit the match that started this fire—with whom I confess I am often intellectually sympathetic—achieved Internet traffic beyond their wildest dreams, and more press than they have enjoyed since they opposed American entry into World War II.

The letter itself is, it must be said, signed by a motley crew. If it was the Trotskyists who brought these folks under the same banner, they have managed to give a whole new meaning to “Popular Front.” The animus of the Fourth International types seems clear—in placing race at the center of history, 1619 elides the central role of class and class conflict in the history of settler colonialism, continental dispossession, and rapacious capitalism. But that is probably not the same hill that Wilentz and the gang of four are planting their flag on. So what gives?

What is odd about the letter is that it implies that the singular problem with the 1619 Project is that journalists are practicing history without a license. Reading only the WSWS interviews and the subsequent historians’ letter, one might be surprised to learn that several well-respected historians actually contributed material directly to the Times project: Anne Bailey, Kevin Kruse, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Tiya Miles, and Mary Elliott (who curated a special supplementary Times “broadsheet” for the 1619 Project organized around objects in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture). So clearly it is not that the editors at the Times shut out the voices of historians; it seems that they consulted with the wrong historians. Given the qualifications of the scholars who did work on the project, that is a most unfortunate impression to convey.

The letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like? The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay that frames the entire project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones’s essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” As the letter bluntly points out, “This is not true.” Admittedly, at a minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence”? How about “some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge that it would secure their investments in slavery”? Presumably at least some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less objectionable: “there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them.” While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of overstatement, this is more a matter of emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.

Similarly, the letter declares “misleading” Hannah-Jones’s emphasis on Lincoln’s 1862 advocacy of colonization, as the movement to encourage blacks to “self-deport” was called, to the exclusion of any examples of his commitment to racial equality. This, too, is a matter of emphasis and nuance, neglecting evidence that Lincoln ultimately favored some (limited) form of black citizenship. It would have been nice if Hannah-Jones had balanced colonization against some of that countervailing evidence, but many fine historians will find her general case against Lincoln persuasive. Surely, as Frederick Douglass himself pointed out during his 1876 oration on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, colonization was only one among many examples that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro” and that the Great Emancipator “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” 10 I only point this out because it is usually the critics of the 1619 Project who like to present Douglass as the avatar of faith in constitutional liberty and racial equality. Here, in 1876, he sounds a good bit more like Hannah-Jones—or vice versa.

A third “error” asserted in the letter is Hannah-Jones’s blanket statement that “for the most part” (an important qualifier) black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone,” which the historians charge is “distorted.” But let’s face it—one can argue with this view, or else propose that such struggles may have succeeded only when they were interracial, but Hannah-Jones does have a point. It is hard to deny that interracial struggles for racial justice and full equality have been the exception in the American past far more than the rule. Should Silverstein or Hannah-Jones issue a correction along the lines of “white Americans have often joined forces with blacks to advance struggles against racism”? In some very general sense, that is true; but many historians (including me) would regard such a view itself as a serious distortion of the past. One might also quote her following sentence: “Yet we never fought only for ourselves.” I take that as an inspirational way of acknowledging the indispensable African American contribution to liberty, rather than “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,” as the letter writers charge.

Three examples of disputable errors, or perhaps overstatements, in a single essay. Even if bolstered by what the letter refers to as “verifiable fact,” that’s not much on which to rest a dismissal of the entire project. The signatories to the letter seem especially perturbed at the massive effort to inject “an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times ” into America’s K-12 classrooms, fearing that this may lead to a deformation of U.S. history. But even a cursory glance at the curricular materials provided by the project suggests otherwise. The lesson plans accompanying Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, emphasize the role played by the black freedom struggle in advancing democracy and liberty in America. The focus is less on the role of blacks as perpetual victims of persistent white racism than on the fact that all Americans are beneficiaries of their ceaseless fight for racial justice. To the degree that the curriculum might perpetuate the primary error identified by the historians—the misconstrual of the American Revolution as a pro-slavery insurrection—it rests on this question: “What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy’?” 11 A reasonable prompt, and only one among many in the curriculum accompanying the project.

None of this is to defend unconditionally what appears in the 1619 Project. Historians would be justified to complain that the Times presents as a radical reorientation an interpretation that differs little from a long-term, if still incomplete, trend to move African American history to the center of the American narrative. I share my colleagues’ frustration that journalists occasionally draw on years of our unacknowledged research to publish under the banner of “Extra, extra, never been told before!” Reasonable interpretive disagreements can stem from the bad habit some journalists have of substituting dramatic overstatement for historical analysis, and there is no shame in pointing these out. The treatment of American slavery in isolation from the presence of the so-called “peculiar institution” in the larger Atlantic World is out of step with current historiography. The project’s emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change, deserves to be challenged. And, as the Trotskyists point out, Marxists may find the substitution of “race” for class relations disconcerting. But singling out errors in one essay does not suffice to dismiss the project in its entirety. So far, the critiques by historians have paid little or no attention to the section based on the NMAAHC material. I have yet to see mention of Khalil Muhammad’s essay on sugar, Tiya Miles’s reflections on the entangled histories of Wall Street and enslavement, or Kevin Kruse’s account of the racist origins of urban sprawl. Essays on music, public health, mass incarceration, and more seem to go unmentioned either by the Trotskyists or in the historians’ letter. To my knowledge, no specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching. I find these lacunae puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.

Let me return to the monument on the hill in Brooklyn. As a visitor gazes down on the towers of Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, and New York’s upper harbor, contemplating the glorious history of the struggle for freedom that still frames the public national narrative for most Americans, she would be forgiven for thinking that African Americans were not a part of the story. Even a memorial commemorating the single moment in U.S. history most undeniably entangled with slavery and race neglects the place of African Americans in that narrative. To find that, a visitor to Green-Wood would have to trudge back down the hill to the neglected “Colored Lots,” which are confined to the southwest corner of the cemetery. 12 I fear this remains closer to the rule than the exception in the national memorial culture. That deserves to change, and it would be a shame if historians stood in the way of such a transformation.

                        A.C.L.

1 Jake Silverstein, “1619,” New York Times Magazine , August 18, 2019, 4–5.

2 Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York, 2019).

3 Thanks to Associate Editor Michelle Moyd for this trenchant observation.

4 Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, and David North, “The New York Times ’s 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of American and World History,” World Socialist Web Site, September 6, 2019, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html .

5 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).

6 All of the interviews, along with other material on the dispute, can be found at https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/historySubCategory/h-uslab/ .

7 Most powerfully in Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990): 95–118.

8 Niemuth, Mackaman, and North, “The New York Times ’s 1619 Project.”

9 The letter can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html .

10 The digitized full text of Douglass’s well-known “Oration by Frederick Douglass, delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14th, 1876,” can be found in the Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcrbmrp.t0c12/?st=gallery .

11 “Lesson Plan: Exploring ‘The Idea of America’ by Nikole Hannah-Jones,” Pulitzer Center, August 13, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/builder/lesson/lesson-plan-exploring-idea-america-nikole-hannah-jones-26503 .

12 Natalie Meade, “Unearthing Black History at Green-Wood Cemetery,” New Yorker , March 6, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/unearthing-black-history-at-green-wood-cemetery .

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Why We Published The 1619 Project

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The project puts the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of our national story.

By Jake Silverstein Dec. 20, 2019

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619? That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.

Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.

The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.

The 1619 Project began with the publication, in August 2019, of a special issue of The New York Times Magazine containing essays on different aspects of contemporary American life, from mass incarceration to rush-hour traffic, that have their roots in slavery and its aftermath. Each essay takes up a modern phenomenon, familiar to all, and reveals its history. The first, by the staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones (from whose mind this project sprang), provides the intellectual framework for the project and can be read as an introduction .

Alongside the essays, you will find 17 literary works that bring to life key moments in American history . These works are all original compositions by contemporary black writers who were asked to choose events on a timeline of the past 400 years. The poetry and fiction they created is arranged chronologically throughout the issue, and each work is introduced by the history to which the author is responding.

In addition to these elements, we partnered with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture to create a brief visual history of slavery . That is as good a place to start as any.

A word of warning: There is gruesome material in these stories, material that readers will find disturbing. That is, unfortunately, as it must be. American history cannot be told truthfully without a clear vision of how inhuman and immoral the treatment of black Americans has been. By acknowledging this shameful history, by trying hard to understand its powerful influence on the present, perhaps we can prepare ourselves for a more just future.

That is the hope of this project.

The 1619 Project

The new york times magazine.

The Idea of America , by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Capitalism , by Matthew Desmond

A Broken Health Care System , by Jeneen Interlandi

Traffic , by Kevin M. Kruse

Undemocratic Democracy , by Jamelle Bouie

Medical Inequality , by Linda Villarosa

American Popular Music , by Wesley Morris

Sugar , by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Mass Incarceration , by Bryan Stevenson

The Wealth Gap , by Trymaine Lee

Hope, a Photo Essay , by Djeneba Aduayom

400 Years: A Literary Timeline

Special Broadsheet Section

Why Can’t We Teach This? by Nikita Stewart

A Brief History of Slavery , by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes

The 1619 Podcast

Jake Silverstein is editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine.

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