The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

I am the American heartbreak— The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago. —Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak: 1619”

Learning history made the world make sense. It provided the key to decode all that I saw around me.

We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.

African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They’d arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the English people who got the credit for building it all.

The year white Virginians first purchased enslaved Africans, the start of American slavery, an institution so influential and corrosive that it both helped create the nation and nearly led to its demise, is indisputably a foundational historical date. And yet I’d never heard of it before.

I was starting to figure out that the histories we learn in school or, more casually, through popular culture, monuments, and political speeches rarely teach us the facts but only certain facts.

The majority of high school students can’t tell you that the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass had once been enslaved; nor can they define the Middle Passage, which led to the forced migration of nearly 13 million people across the Atlantic and transformed—or, arguably, enabled—the existence of the United States.2

“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.

“Why would we expect the nation’s power structure even to acknowledge, much less come to terms with, such a dark and formative chapter in our collective family history?” the renowned historian Peter H. Wood wrote in a 1999 paper on slavery and denial. “After all, as several eminent academics have recently reminded us, ‘nations need to control national memory, because nations keep their shape by shaping their citizens’ understanding of the

there were the efforts by President Donald Trump and his followers to undermine a free and fair 2020 presidential election—one where high Black turnout in key heavily Black cities would largely determine the results.

Black voters organized and overcame efforts to suppress their votes in an election where many feared that the nation was careening toward authoritarianism, showing yet again the vital and unparalleled role of Black people in preserving our democracy.

The story of Black America cannot be disentangled from the story of America, and our attempts to do so have forced us to tell ourselves a tale full of absences, evasions, and lies, one that fails to satisfactorily explain the society we live in and leaves us unable to become the society we want to be.

But for Black Americans, the traditional origin story has never rung true. Black Americans understand that we have been taught the history of a country that does not exist. What I have heard again and again since the original project was published is that the 1619 Project, for many people, finally made America make sense.

white Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Our myths have not served us well. We are the most unequal of the Western democracies. We incarcerate our citizens at the highest rates. We suffer the greatest income inequality. Americans’ life spans are shorter than those of the people in the nations we compare ourselves to.

With this project, we work toward a country that, in the words of Douglass, “shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.”38 If we are a truly great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.

But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to Black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves—Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

The enslaved had but one loyalty: their freedom. And they used the conflict to organize and conspire against the colonists as early as 1774, running away to join British troops and presenting themselves at British forts.25 Over the course of the war, thousands of enslaved people would join the British—far outnumbering those who joined the Patriot cause.

As Samuel Johnson, an English writer opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told his visitors. “You and we are different races…. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”

An astounding 78 percent of free Black military-age men living in free states would serve in the Union army, even as they faced greater risk than white soldiers. Confederate troops often killed Black soldiers rather than capture them and also enslaved Black war captives.64 Thousands of Black women also contributed to the war effort, serving as cooks and nurses and spies, and withdrawing their valuable labor from Confederates by escaping to Union lines. About one in five Black soldiers died in the war, mirroring the percentage of white soldiers, and Lincoln acknowledged that Black contributions helped turn the tide in favor of the Union.

Few were interested in leaving the country. Instead, most would have fervently supported the sentiment of a resolution against Black colonization put forward at a convention of Black leaders in New York some decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers…. Here we were born, and here we will die.”

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.”

In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull the remaining federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction.

Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

white people understood that once Black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return to their subjugation at home.

During the height of racial terror in this country, Black Americans were not merely killed in mob attacks and lynchings but castrated, burned alive, and dismembered, with their body parts displayed in storefronts and strewn across lawns in Black communities.

As the scholar Joe R. Feagin put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.”90 For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing their native religions.

When the world listens to quintessentially American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi delta, we birthed jazz and the blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.

Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed— / I, too, am America.”

I wish now that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

December 1662 Virginia’s House of Burgesses passes a new law holding that “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” This doctrine, known as partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is brought forth follows the belly”), is a departure from English tradition, in which a child’s status followed that of the father. The law incentivizes the rape of enslaved Black women by their white enslavers.

Through these laws, colonial landowners constructed race as a system of power in which anyone categorized as Black could be dominated by anyone categorized as white.

rum was the lubricant that helped make the international slave trade run like a well-oiled machine.

Since sugar came to these shores, there hasn’t been a time when Black people weren’t getting the short end of the cane stalk. From plantation to farm to table, African Americans have always paid the highest costs for sugar cultivation.

James Baldwin

“any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exactly the same thing—word for word—he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad [n——] so there won’t be any more like him.”

The deep-seated, gnawing terror that Black people might, one day, rise up and demand for themselves the same freedoms and inalienable rights that led white colonists to declare the American Revolution has shaped our nation’s politics, culture, and systems of justice ever since.

Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams.

“Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This notion—that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them—ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States.

Meanwhile, the flames of insurrection continued to burn brightly in Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture, who had assumed leadership of the rebellion, and his army successfully held off military invasions from the French, Spanish, and British—the greatest military powers on earth at the time.

Although France had fought desperately to maintain its power to exploit and control the Black population, the rebels had managed to defeat Napoleon’s army—reportedly the greatest military power on earth—and declare their independence less than three decades after American colonists declared their own.