The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

As has happened so often in our history, Black struggles for equality resulted in greater rights for all Americans. In its fight to secure healthcare for Black Americans, the NMA helped to dramatically improve access for citizens across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum.

In the aftermath of this decision, multiple Republican-dominated states, freed of federal oversight, passed laws that disenfranchised Black people by limiting early voting and same-day registration and instituting voter ID laws that “targeted African American voters with surgical precision,” to quote the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.14 Fourteen states had new voter restrictions in time for the 2016 election, including Ohio and Wisconsin. These new voter-suppression policies were crucial to Trump’s victory.15 And following Trump’s defeat in 2020, Republican state legislators have introduced more than 350 laws in forty-seven states that would make it harder for Americans, particularly Black Americans, to vote.

But what is left out of this story is that this Second Reconstruction was needed because the First Reconstruction, after the Civil War ended in 1865, failed to bring into being and sustain an equitable nation—an effort undermined by the propaganda of racial progress. What is left out of the story of our time is that a Third Reconstruction is needed because the Second Reconstruction failed to actualize King’s dream, again undermined by the racial-progress propaganda.

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.

According to a 2020 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950, an average of three every two weeks for eight and a half decades.52 (Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.53)

As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where Black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable for federally backed mortgages. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all Black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.

This is our national truth: America would not be America without the wealth from Black labor, without Black striving, Black ingenuity, Black resistance. So much of the music, the food, the language, the art, the scientific advances, the athletic renown, the fashion, the guarantees of civil rights, the oratory and intellectual inspiration that we export to the world, that draws the world to us, comes forth from Black Americans,