The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Loving Black culture has never demanded a corresponding love of Black people. And loving Black culture has tended to result in loving the life out of it.

The term might be out to mock or judge or offset, but it points to a crucial distinction between what’s appreciative and what’s appropriative. Flaws and all, these are non-Black artists committed to Black music, often working alongside Black musicians—which is to say, with Black musicians’ consent.

That kind of collaboration can’t change what took place a century or two before. It can’t change the sins of the twentieth century.

Black music brims with call-and-response, layers of syncopation, and this rougher element called “noise,” derived from unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument. Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The breathless flutter of Charlie Parker’s saxophone. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The misty wonder of Alberta Hunter and the wondrous hurt of Billie Holiday. The visceral stank of Etta James. The land-mine phrasing of Aretha Franklin. The pulpit ferocity of live-in-concert Whitney Houston. Prince committing arson with an electric guitar.

It was music no one “composed” (in part because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of uncertainty, of anguish. Of existential introspection.

Frederick Douglass writes in one of his personal histories, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, about listening to the singing of the enslaved: They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone…. Especially would they do this when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following words:— “I am going away to the Great House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!”

This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of Slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.46

Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined. —Justice Hugo Black, 1964

Many forces have prevented the United States from achieving universal healthcare, including a failure to properly regulate the trillion-dollar healthcare industry and a near-total unwillingness to grapple with the ethics of for-profit medicine. But the role of racism and the legacy of slavery cannot be denied. The same arguments—about dependency and socialized medicine, equity and human rights—that thwarted the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division in Crumpler’s time and blocked universal healthcare during Cobb’s time have echoed down to the present day.

How are we ever gonna be free if we only believe the things they tell us are possible?”

Saying that the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology, one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress.

Racial progress. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine in 1957. Racial progress. The lunch-counter sit-ins by Black college students in 1960 led to the desegregation of Southern businesses. Racial progress. Freedom Riders helped desegregate bus terminals in 1961. Racial progress. The March on Washington and the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., made nationwide news in 1963. Racial progress. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Racial progress.

One year earlier, Malcolm X had stood before a meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) at a Methodist church in Cleveland. “How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours?” he asked, speaking of the Civil Rights Act, which was making its way through Congress at the time. “You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress.”59

This iteration of the racial-progress refrain, which can be traced back to the Cold War pamphlet The Negro in American Life, focuses our attention on how the United States has come a long way (the past) and how America has a long way to go (the future). This past/future logic has compelled generation after generation to overlook the present—indeed, the presence of racism.

The long sweep of America has been defined by two forward motions: one force widening the embrace of Black Americans and another force maintaining or widening their exclusion.

It is Black Americans who have consistently made the case, even when they were utterly disenfranchised and forced out of the political process, that all citizens deserve equal access to the benefits of a country founded on a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The efforts of Black Americans to seek freedom through resistance and rebellion against violations of their rights have always been one of this nation’s defining traditions.

throughout our history, the most ardent, courageous, and consistent freedom fighters within this country have been Black Americans.

Wealth, not simply securing equal rights, is the means to security in America. Wealth—assets and investments minus debt—is what enables you to buy a home in a safer neighborhood with better amenities and better-funded schools.

While unchecked discrimination still plays a significant role in circumscribing opportunities for Black Americans, it is white Americans’ centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste today.

Today Black Americans remain the most segregated group of people in America and are five times as likely as white Americans to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The difference between the lived experience of Black Americans and white Americans when it comes to wealth—along the entire spectrum of income from the poorest to the richest—can be described as nothing other than a chasm.

the average Black family with children holds just one cent of wealth for every dollar held by the average white family with children.16

The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans, just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s Indigenous people.

To

borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father.

Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, providing for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of acres of former Confederate land in forty-acre tracts to newly freed people along coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This became known as “forty acres and a mule.”

“Instead of seeing Field Order 15 as a blueprint for the transformation of Southern society, he viewed it mainly as a way of relieving the immediate pressure caused by the large number of impoverished Blacks following his army.”27 And yet, Foner writes, the “prospect beckoned of a transformation of Southern society more radical even than the end of slavery.”28 One of the ministers at that meeting, Ulysses L. Houston, organized one thousand Black residents and claimed land in Skidaway Island, Georgia, where they founded a self-governing Black community. Some forty thousand freedpeople staked their claim to four hundred thousand acres of “Sherman land” in a region, Foner writes, “that had spawned one of the wealthiest segments of the planter class.”29

The Treasury Department, under President Woodrow Wilson, first issued a press release insisting the United States owed nothing and that formerly enslaved people, if they had a claim at all, should seek reparations from “their masters.”36 A federal court then rejected the claim, citing government immunity—which says that the government must consent to being sued—and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.

To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property.

“With the advent of emancipation,” writes the historian Keri Leigh Merritt, “Blacks became the only race in the U.S. ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital.”47

But even as the federal government decided that Black people were undeserving of any restitution, it was bestowing millions of acres in the West on white Americans under the Homestead Act, while also enticing white foreigners to immigrate with the offer of free land.

(Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.53)

In other words, while Black Americans were being systematically, generationally deprived of the ability to build wealth, and while some of them were also being robbed of the little they had managed to gain, white Americans were not only free to earn money and accumulate wealth with exclusive access to the best jobs, best schools, and best credit terms but were also getting substantial government help in doing so.

The inclination to bandage over and move on is a definitive American feature when it comes to anti-Black racism and its social and material effects.

remarkable imperviousness to facts when it comes to white advantage and architected Black disadvantage is what emboldens some white Americans to quote the passage from Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech about being judged by the content of your character and not by the color of your skin. It’s often used as a cudgel against calls for race-specific remedies for Black Americans—while ignoring the part of that same speech where King says Black people have marched on the capital to cash “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ”65

typical Black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households. “No progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing income and wealth inequalities between Black and white households,” according to the study.68

Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against Black Americans’ efforts to do the same.

reparations and how a program would work. I will not spend much time on that here, except to make these few points: Reparations are not about punishing white Americans, and white Americans are not the ones who would pay for them. It does not matter if your ancestors engaged in slavery or if you just immigrated here two weeks ago. Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay.

In addition to reparations, our wealthy nation is morally obligated to do more for all Americans who struggle by adopting such things as a livable wage; universal healthcare, childcare, and college; and student loan debt relief.

There are living victims of racial apartheid and terrorism born in this country, including civil rights activists who lost their homes and jobs fighting to make this country a democracy, who have never received any sort of restitution for what they endured. Soon, like their enslaved ancestors, they will all be dead, and then we’ll hear the worn excuse that this country owes no reparations because none of the victims are still alive.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?85

America would not be America without the wealth from Black labor, without Black striving, Black ingenuity, Black resistance.

All of this reveals that Black Americans, along with Indigenous people—the two groups forced to be part of this nation—remain the most neglected beneficiaries of the America that would not exist without us.

We cannot make up for all of the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans.

None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.

What happened in 1619, the tragic origin story unveiled throughout this book, set in motion the defining struggle of American life, between freedom and oppression, equality and racism, between the lofty ideals of democracy and the fight to make them real.