Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, the journalist and African-American activist, has raised essential questions about the United States, what our nation means, how moral our history has been, and how honest our storytelling.
She was born in 1976, on the “black side” of town in Waterloo, Iowa. Iowa is a culturally “white” state but there were enough African-Americans in Waterloo for the town to be segregated. Nikole’s father, Milton Hannah, was an African-American with roots in the Mississippi Delta. Her mother, Cheryl Novotny, was a woman of Czech and English descent.
Milton told Nikole and her sisters, ‘Your mother is white but you’ll be treated as a black child, which is what you are.’ He knew it was confusing for his girls to hear this but Milton was determined to prepare his daughters for what they’d encounter in the world.
Nikole registered the tone of her father’s voice. He loved his girls, believed in them and wanted the very best for them — but was warning them that their dark skin would lead them to be underestimated and mistreated.
Nikole wondered ‘Why?’ Why this automatic sorting of people by skin color? She was one of those children always wanting to know more, always suspecting there was more to the story than adults said out loud.
West High School in Waterloo had just one Black Studies elective. Nikole took the elective when she was 15, and it set her mind on fire. HERE was some of the information that had been hidden from her. Black people had been living in this land since 1619, before the coming of the Mayflower in New England, and over 150 years before the Declaration of Independence.
Yet the two “beginnings” of our nation cited in most U.S. history books were the Mayflower and the Declaration of Independence. These were “foundational” acts — the determination to “settle” the Eastern seaboard and the decision to break from Britain’s grasp and seize our independence. And Nikole sensed that foundational acts can’t and shouldn’t be forgotten. They should be talked about in speeches, honored by patriotic holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.
But what if 1619 was “foundational”? What if the strongest legacy of this nation was slavery and its cousin, white supremacy?
Nikole became obsessed with the date 1619, and decided to become a journalist or an historian. She found fascinating the ongoing debates about the past, and scrutinized the past for clues about this powerful strain of racism. White privilege seemed to have a power greater than the noble democratic principles mouthed on the Fourth of July. She noticed that white Americans with no interest in the Founding Fathers or their democratic creed seemed fully conversant and comfortable with white privilege.
In 1994, Nikole graduated from Waterloo West High and went on to the University of Notre Dame, where she was a History and African American Studies major, and once staunchly challenged a written piece on campus which described Native Americans as “savages.”
In 2003, she earned a graduate degree in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, got more reporting experience and, finally, a staff position at the New York Times.
She suggested “The 1619 Project” as a long piece for the New York Times Magazine. She hoped to re-frame U.S. history. What would it mean to regard 1619 as the date of our nation’s founding? What would it mean to downplay the Abolition movement, and President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation?
Plenty of academic work had been done on the evils of slavery; and the black community had the folk wisdom, the gruesome tales, the nightmares handed down the generations… But most whites hadn’t been touched by either the scholarship or folk wisdom of the black community. So Nikole felt this 1619 Project had journalistic relevance.
She got permission from higher-ups at the New York Times to launch her project. One conclusion of the 1619 Project was that one reason the Founding Fathers wanted independence from England was to protect the institution of slavery. A sentence in the 1619 Project read: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.” The ideal was that all men are created equal by God; the lie was that the Founding Fathers used the phrase “all men” without believing it “self-evident” that this included black people.
So the language of The 1619 Project was bold and strong. Still, Hannah-Jones fretted that all of her work on the 1619 Project might sink like a stone and cause not a ripple.
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To put it mildly, it did not. The 1619 Project was controversial from the start. Supporters called it an ‘overdue historical reckoning’ and praised it as ‘unflinching’ — but critics objected to a black woman trying to change the narrative around slavery and racism in the United States. Some objected that nearly all the contributors to the 1619 Project were African-American.
Hannah-Jones replied, ‘Would you object if nearly all the contributors to a history project were white?’
And with The 1619 Project gaining so much attention, Nikole and others began making a school curriculum out of it.
Some critics accused Hannah-Jones of trying to make young white children — and all white people — feel bad about slavery — something that ended 160 years ago.
To this she replied: Yes, slavery was outlawed in 1865, but what was equally evil, and far more durable, was the intense dislike of dark-skinned people that was cultivated on these shores in order to JUSTIFY slavery. And that is still around, she added, and heatedly attacking me and my project for saying so is no way to convince me this country is not racist.
Also, she pointed out that 18th and 19th century American wealth was built on an economy which exploited its laborers, and that this is still the model. The few who get rich rarely know or care about those at the bottom of their corporation. Had slavery laid the groundwork for this amoral model?
Hannah-Jones liked to pose the question: Why do other advanced industrial nations have universal health care, but we don’t? Why do we seem to believe the poor don’t deserve excellent health care? Could it be a legacy of slavery to think the downtrodden deserve their fate?
Tom Cotton, a brainy, ambitious right-wing Republican Senator from Arkansas, proposed a law forbidding any K-12 school receiving Federal funds from using any of the 1619 Project curricula.
President Trump issued an executive order against The 1619 Project, and tried to ban Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work by name from being taught in any public school classroom. No one could ever recall a U.S. president trying to ban by executive order the work of a single journalist or historian.
Some criticism of The 1619 Project was more searching and nuanced. Some said ‘Nikole, I admire your activism in the cause of anti-racism. But does it make sense to have history written by activists? This began as a project of journalism, in which it’s quite proper to ask explosive questions. How did it morph into a project of school curriculum, in which you’re not just asking questions, but instructing students about what happened in the past?
To this Hannah-Jones replied that the New York Times, like many newspapers, has an Education division which turns the paper’s major journalism projects into school curricula. Why she asked, did this routine process only become controversial when it involved questioning the narrative about slavery?
Some social conservatives pushed back against The 1619 Project by saying ‘The black community, by its own admission, is full of people held back by shame, good people who see themselves in a negative light, underachieving, plagued by anxiety disorders, all because of shame.’
So how will white children react when you instruct them to be ashamed of their country’s history? We speak of Thomas Jefferson’s stirring rhetoric rather than his slaveholding because we want our children to emulate the best in him. What’s wrong with that? We emphasize the bravery and sacrifice of those who died in the Civil War rather than the white supremacy that survived the war, because we want our children to emulate bravery and sacrifice. What’s wrong with that?’
Nikole Hannah-Jones replied, ‘What’s wrong with that is that we have to own ALL of our history — not just the part that makes us feel good. Much of the awful polarization in our society right now comes because we’ve never dealt with our problems.’
