The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

At school, I searched desperately to find myself in the American story we were taught, to see my humanity—our humanity—reflected back to me.

He taught us about Richard Allen founding the first independent Black denomination on this soil, and how hard enslaved people fought for the legal right to do things every other race took for granted, such as reading or marrying or keeping your own children.

One of the reasons American children so poorly understand the history and legacy of slavery is because the adults charged with teaching them don’t know it very well, either.

The work of these scholars, who were often inspired to ask new questions about our past by focusing on primary source material inaccessible to or ignored by previous generations, has made clear the central role that slavery and anti-Blackness played in the development of our society and its institutions. To argue otherwise, among professional historians, is now widely understood to be anachronistic and ahistorical.

“Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence,” Jeffries writes. “Although we teach [students] that slavery happened…in some cases, we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential.” This, Jeffries continues, “is profoundly troubling” because it leaves Americans ill-equipped to understand racial inequality today, and that, in turn, leads to intolerance, opposition to efforts to address racial injustice, and the enacting of laws and policies detrimental to Black communities and America writ large.

historians can look at the same set of facts—President Lincoln’s public remarks on colonization, for example—and come to different conclusions about whether his speeches reflected his personal views on repatriating Black Americans outside the United States or that he was simply engaging in a political strategy to avoid scaring away white moderates who opposed both slavery and Black citizenship. “The reality is,” she wrote, “a valid interpretation could come down on both sides of the issue.”

This group spent weeks assembling its report, which Trump released as one of the last acts of his presidency, on Martin Luther King Day. Written without input from any scholars who specialize in American history, it sought to reinforce the exceptional nature of our country, and to put forth a “patriotic” narrative that downplays racism and inequality and emphasizes a unity predicated on seeing slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial injustice as aberrations in a fundamentally just and exceptionally free nation.21 The commission faced wide condemnation, with forty-seven groups representing academic historians signing a statement drawn up by the American Historical Association that accused the commission of issuing a report “written hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious ‘hearings,’ without any consultation with professional historians of the United States” and failing “to engage a rich and vibrant body of scholarship that has evolved over the last seven decades.”

What these bills make clear is that the fights over the 1619 Project, like most fights over history, at their essence are about power.

As Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1892 autobiography, “The story of the master never wanted for narrators. The masters, to tell their story, had at call all the talent and genius that wealth and influence could command. They have had their full day in court. Literature, theology, philosophy, law and learning have come willingly to their service, and if condemned, they have not been condemned unheard.” Our part, as Douglass said, “has been to tell the story of the slave.”27

In doing so, we argue that much about American identity, so many of our nation’s most vexing problems, our basest inclinations, and its celebrated and unique cultural contributions spring not from the ideals of 1776 but from the realities of 1619, from the contradictions and the ideological struggles of a nation founded on both slavery and freedom.

“Our memory of the past is often managed and manipulated,” according to the historian Gary B. Nash.30 The revolutionary period remains “a sacred relic.”31

“despite its ambitions of objectivity,” public history is molded by the perspectives of the most powerful members of society.

How do you romanticize a revolution made possible by the forced labor of your ancestors, one that built white freedom on a Black slavery that would persist for another century after Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”?

Like all the Black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the Black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst.

Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would look very different;

As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half-Black brother of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, born to her father and a woman he enslaved.

Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that Black people were human beings, but over time the enslavers created a network of laws and customs, astounding in both their precision and their cruelty, designed to strip the enslaved of every aspect of their humanity.

George Washington, in 1774, argued of the British that “those from whom we have a right to seek protection are endeavouring by every piece of Art and despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us.”21 At the time he wrote those words, Washington derived his wealth and influence from the forced slave labor of more than 120 human beings, in addition to the men, women, and children that had been passed on to his wife after the death of her first husband.

The decision to deploy slavery as a metaphor for white grievances had devastating consequences for those who were actually enslaved: it helped ensure that abolition would not become a revolutionary cause, Bradley argues.

The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just thirty-three, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came in part from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. So they also understood that abolition would have upended the economies of both the North and the South. The truth is that we might never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that the institution would continue unmolested.