Democracy demands courage
This piece is a transcript from Hannah-Jones’ address to our audience in September 2025. It has been lightly edited for clarity before being published.
Thank you so much [to the] John Adams Institute, which [was] responsible for the very first time I ever came to this country […] thank you all for coming out to hear what I promise you will not be an inspirational talk. These are not very inspiring times, unfortunately, and so as I stand here in the Netherlands, I’ve been thinking about how this is a land that has also felt the weight of heavy histories. When my family and I first came here a few years ago, we visited some of the history museums, the Anne Frank House, we also visited the slavery memorial, we did the Black Heritage tour. We well, first we did the mainstream canal tour, and the next time we came, I was really insistent that I be connected in with Black communities here in the Netherlands. That’s when we were able to take the Black Heritage Tour, which of course talks about how this city’s wealth like the United States was also built on human bondage. We did that because I always believe that it’s an abdication of our duty as travelers, of our duty as human beings if we don’t confront the past wherever we go.
During our last visit, my family and I were in attendance on Emancipation Day as the Dutch king apologized for the Dutch role in slavery and the slave trade. In that moment, I was again struck by the interconnectivity of it all, because here we were descendants of slavery ourselves who had traveled across this ocean. We had traveled from a city in the United States that had been colonized by the Dutch 400 years ago under the name of New Amsterdam, and we were in a city that would see its first enslaved African in 1626 brought by the Dutch. We live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn — may sound familiar — called Bedford Stuyvesant, of course is named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Netherland and also one of the largest slaveholders in that colony who is responsible for the massive growth of slaveholding in what would become the city of New York.
Yet here we were all these centuries later witnessing this apology, and I thought, as I often do, that while many may roll their eyes at apologies and acknowledgements like this, that they actually do matter for a society that wants to be just and fair and honest because our history is shaping us. Oftentimes, it is warping us whether we acknowledge that history or not. So, this trip marks my third time in less than five years visiting the Netherlands. I have to say I didn’t see that coming, and yet this time I come representing a vastly different country than I did on my first two visits. I come in in the moment in the United States where our own heavy history and our unwillingness to grapple honestly with it is collapsing our democracy at breathtaking speed. We are witnessing what you all witnessed in the last century. People are being snatched off the streets and disappeared by agents of the state with no due process. There is a broad-scale attack on civil society, on the arts, on universities, on museums, on our national parks, on philanthropy. Our legal and political systems are also under attack as a strong man attempts to reshape multi this multi-racial nation into one that is led solely by its shrinking white majority and that remembers just a single narrative that justifies it being led by a single race. As I stand here today, the United States is not at the brink of autocracy. We are, according to many scholars, some of which have now fled the United States, already in the midst of an early stage autocracy — and I would argue it’s not early anymore. That in a nation that likes to brag that it is the oldest continuing democracy in the world, democracy is not holding and there is likely tremendous suffering to come.
How did societies allow themselves to lose their freedoms? How did they allow such cruelty to be visited upon their fellow human beings? How did people voluntarily give up their own rights?
You know, when I was young and painfully nerdy, and I know that’s hard to believe because I’m very fabulous now, I had this very awkward obsession of watching Holocaust documentaries and reading history books on Jim Crow. I used to turn these questions over and over and over in my head. How did societies allow themselves to lose their freedoms? How did they allow such cruelty to be visited upon their fellow human beings? How did people voluntarily give up their own rights? I remembered in the documentaries and in the books, I would be fascinated by the still photos because that gave you a moment to pause and look in the faces and reflect. I would look at those photos of people who are not the victims of oppression, laughing and taking their children to parks and going to the symphony and celebrating birthdays. In those frames, those people looked good and they looked kind. All the while, brutal acts were being done in their names just down the road, and I wondered how could people love their families and yet still abide such cruelty. I was particularly obsessed with the history of reconstruction in the United States. And if you don’t know about that period, I forgive you. Not because you’re an international crowd, but because we don’t teach that history in America very well either. We don’t teach it very well for a reason. You see, the United States was founded as a democratic republic by landed white men who believed in democracy, but only for other landed white men.
Since the purchase of those first captive Africans from a Dutch-made ship in the year 1619, race and racism has always functioned as the Achilles heel of my nation because the people who would go on to import hundreds of thousands of Africans had no intention of granting citizenship to people who had been enslaved and they had no intention that democracy would ever one day include them. So at emancipation, the United States, the land of the free, I’m sure you’ve all heard of that, was actually home to the largest population of enslaved people in the world. Suddenly, having brought about the end of slavery by fighting the deadliest war in American history, the nation had to decide, well, what do we do with these four million people? These African-descended people who are now suddenly free with no rights of citizenship and no legal birthright in their country of their own birth. So briefly, the nation decided that it was going to attempt multi-racial democracy to ensure that racial caste could never again force this nation to war — that racial caste would not tear this country apart. That period was known as reconstruction, and you’ve probably never heard of it because it only lasted for twenty years. So just a little math, and journalists are not very good at math, but I can do it a little bit. We had 350 years of slavery. We fought a war that lasted four years to end slavery, and then we tried to build multi-racial democracy for twenty years. It was this remarkable period in my nation’s history because people who had just been enslaved a few years ago were now serving in the Senate and in Congress. They were building schools and attending colleges. The university that I now teach at, Howard University, was founded in our nation’s capital, which was built by enslaved people in 1867 to serve people who had once been enslaved, but the rot at the root was not so easily cured. Too many white Americans did not believe in multi-racial democracy, and they had no intention of sharing power with those they considered to be their inferiors.
Democracy itself would not return to the United States for at least a century, even as America arrogantly exported the mandate for democracy abroad that it would violently suppress at home.
Within twenty years, that brief experiment with multi-racial democracy was ended through a deal and enforced through violence. Black Americans lost nearly all the rights they had earned during slavery, including the right to vote. Black Americans would be purged from Congress and most institutions. and democracy itself would not return to the United States for at least a century, even as America arrogantly exported the mandate for democracy abroad that it would violently suppress at home, forcing black Americans to live under a system of racial apartheid. If we’re talking about the history of World War II, Black Americans have always disproportionately fought in the US military and came abroad to help liberate Europe and then came home to be lynched for daring to wear their uniforms back in the democracy of the United States. It was fighting in World War II and experiencing some semblance of freedom here in Europe that made Black Americans go home and say, “We will never live back under fascism in our own country again.”
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Jacob Lawrence was born into that system. He was he would produce some of his greatest work under that system of racial apartheid in spite of it and also because of it. He studied this history, this history that the mythology of American exceptionalism sought to erase. He understood, as so many marginalized people do, that what they call history is most often actually memory — because black people existed, queer people existed, indigenous people existed. They just were not part of the official story, the public memory that those in power wanted to put forth. Jacob Lawrence understood, I understand, that those in power control the past in order to control the present, and that authoritarian regimes almost always come first for the artists, for the writers, for the intellectuals because of our insistence on challenging the false collective memory upon which power thrives.
When I was a girl, I used to contemplate what it must have been like to watch democracy born and then watch democracy die, to watch industry and universities and lawmakers capitulate as they believed that if they sacrificed the most marginal, their own freedom would be preserved. I don’t need to contemplate that history now to understand it because I’m living it. I am a witness to it. I am a part of it as we all are. This is what makes history, accurate history, so dangerous in an autocratic society.
History and truth telling about our past is an inoculation.
I hope it bothers you a bit in your stomach to hear me now describing the United States as autocratic society. I hope you take it as a warning because history and truth telling about our past is an inoculation. Autocrats rise based on lies and distrust and a sense that they are the rightful leaders and only certain people should hold power. Understanding history means we understand what our societies are capable of because we live in denial. We believe we are good people from a good country and a just society, and so that blinds us to how even good people and just societies can allow horrific things to be done in their name. If we don’t understand history and therefore don’t understand what we’re capable of, we are left unprepared to fight because we have failed to learn our history or indeed failed to learn from it.
Instead of standing for the rights our forefathers and foremothers fought for, the United States right now is a nation awash in cowardice. Not just from the people we believe to be our adversaries, but most devastatingly from people we believed to be our allies. We have witnessed capitulation, justification, an abandonment of the most vulnerable in society, a refusal to stand up for multiculturalism amidst the greatest attack on civil rights in a century, an acceptance of lawlessness in a society that said what made us superior was that we were a nation of laws. In America, we are witnessing a collective turning of our backs as we cast blame on those who sought to make our society more fair, who are trying to grapple with its history and injustices, even if sometimes that effort was messy and imperfect. For years, I’ve been trying to raise the alarm through my writing, through my public speaking, to warn us that we are still being held captive to the poison at our root. That we had to be honest about our past if we were ever to overcome it. That in America, racial injustice and democracy are antithetical to each other. That as long as we maintain the former, the latter was at risk. For multiracial democracy in America was not achieved until 1965 — I don’t care what the American propaganda tells you. When significant portions of your society have their right to vote brutally oppressed, you do not have democracy.
The United States did not gain democracy until 1965 after a bloody and deadly civil rights struggle. and with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ensured Black Americans and other minorities the right to vote. That means that while I look very, very young, democracy is only ten years older than I am. A few years ago, I had the honor of sitting on a panel with four veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Now, Mississippi, you may not know, is the most heavily black state in the United States and therefore it was the most thoroughly fascist state in America. Its black population which was majority black did not have the right to vote, could not go to white places of business, could not use the public library, could not use the hospitals. This state of apartheid was allowed through violence. My father was born there. Mississippi is my ancestral land. In the midst of all that horror, black Mississippians were risking their lives and too often losing their lives to democratize Mississippi and therefore democratize America.
She had a fourth grade education and yet here I am traveling the world and standing before you today — in the span of one generation, which helps us understand that if that much progress can be made in one generation it can also be lost.
When I sat on this panel with these veterans of that movement, and I brought my fifteen-year-old daughter who’s hiding in the back because she’s very tired of hearing me give talks. This talk, I wouldn’t allow her to stay in the back; because this talk, I wanted her to understand and hear from the men and women who made her life possible. My daughter was sitting a few feet away, this carefree black girl, and she was hearing the stories of men who were the same age as her when they had gotten arrested for the first time after deciding they were going to challenge the system of racial apartheid and were willing to give their lives if need be. I remember sitting there and looking at her and then looking at them and thinking how short how very short was the distance between her freedom and their apartheid. While I was up there someone asked the panelists, “well, how were you not afraid? How were you not afraid to stand up?” Every last one of them said, “what do you mean? We were terrified. Of course, we were afraid. Our lives were in danger. But living as a black person in Mississippi was already to live in a state of constant fear. And we decided we’d rather die fighting than submit to the slow death of taking part in our own oppression.” I was absolutely shook by that. All these years of studying this history, and yet, it wasn’t until that moment that it struck me. We’ve been thinking about courage the wrong way. Probably because we haven’t had to exhibit much of it. Courage is not the absence of fear. In fact, courage requires fear or it’s not courageous. And so what we’re all being tasked with doing is not to be unafraid, but to say being afraid is not going to stop me from doing the right thing and what I’m called here to do. In a landscape of so little courage, I remind myself that I am the most profound testament to what my ancestors bore, what my ancestors built. I’m the granddaughter of Arlina Tilman who was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1924 with no legal rights. My father was born in a cotton field because black people, black women were not allowed to give birth at the hospital there. She had a fourth grade education and yet here I am traveling the world and standing before you today — in the span of one generation, which helps us understand that if that much progress can be made in one generation it can also be lost.
Many in my home country, those few who are privileged enough to do, so are looking to leave the United States right now. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’m having with people and many of them are considering finding refuge in Europe. I find that unwise. I find that cowardly because my struggle is with and for my own people, and I’m not going to abandon them even though I have the means to do so. Europe is not inoculated from the ghosts of its past [either]. It is also struggling against some of the same forces that oppose multiculturalism. A multiculturalism that Europe is experiencing because of its own empire. That the people that built the wealth of your country and the other countries here now want a part of that wealth. Too many people want them to stay back home at the places where all of the wealth was extracted. The problems of multiculturalism in Europe are the problems of colonial empire. This isn’t a safe place for us either, just because we’re not the victims of this particular empire. Even more so, the truth is, and this has always been the case, even if we do too often fail to acknowledge it, if some of us are not safe, then none of us are. We can flee to another country and not resolve the issues of our own and those problems will simply seek us there.
Should democracy in the United States collapse, if the beacon of freedom across the world, [whether that’s propaganda or not], allows itself to succumb to autocracy, then democracy is safe nowhere. What happened in the Netherlands during the Holocaust is undoubtedly connected to what is happening in the United States right now. If they come for me today, they will come for you tomorrow. As much as we may resist this truth sometimes, history has shown that whether it is the undocumented immigrants in the United States or the descendants of slavery in the Netherlands or the Palestinians in Gaza. It is only in our collective and mutual struggle for liberation of all people that we ourselves sustain our own liberation. It is only in our collective and mutual struggle for the liberation of all people that we all can be free.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist renowned for her work on civil rights and racial injustice. She is the creator of The 1619 Project, a groundbreaking initiative by The New York Times Magazine that reexamines the legacy of slavery in the United States and its enduring impact on American society. Hannah-Jones’s reporting has earned her numerous accolades, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Peabody Award, and multiple National Magazine Awards. She serves as the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy, and is a co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. She was a guest of the John Adams Institute in June 2023 and September 2025.
