The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Haiti became the first and only country in the Americas where enslaved Africans threw off their shackles, fought for their freedom, defeated European powers, established their own nation, and pledged to defend their freedom and independence until their “last breath.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Codes spoke for themselves…. No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.”

Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black veterans suffered brutal abuse at the hands of white vigilante mobs who viewed Black military service as an offensive and threatening assertion of equal citizenship.

As historian Carol Anderson observes in White Rage, the mere presence of Black people was not the problem; the problem was “blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”

A wave of Black rebellion rocked the United States in the months and years that followed. Roughly two thousand uprisings occurred between May 1968 and December 1972, nearly all of which were sparked by routine police violence.

Considering this history, it should have come as no surprise that the election of the first Black president and anxiety over shifting racial demographics due to immigration—including a widely publicized projection that white people will be a racial minority by the mid-twenty-first century—would be followed by a rise in white nationalism, hate crimes, and vigilante violence, as well as the election of politicians like Donald Trump, a man who rose to power by exploiting racial fears and divisions and sought to maintain power by thwarting democracy.

James Baldwin

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”

To help deny liberty to the men who denied me liberty, proving that toubab have no idea what that word mean. Never did. And never will.

Today, African Americans and Native Americans share the highest incarceration and poverty rates in the country, as well as the lowest high school graduation numbers. Both groups appear at the bottom of a range of health and well-being indicators, and both have suffered high rates of serious illness during the Covid-19 pandemic.12 And yet the two groups have often struggled to find solidarity, a painful legacy of the way they learned to regard each other in the nation’s formative years.

But the British also saw Native people as unchristian “heathens” and as “savages” who had not actually developed the land in a civilized manner that would qualify them as rightful owners.

Natives who enslaved people found favor with the U.S. government, garnering positive reviews in the federal agents’ reports and earning government contracts and military honors.

The United States stands today as one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (those eighteen to sixty-five) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

three-fifths of a citizen—and

To this day, the fifteen states where slavery remained legal as of 1861 still hold the power to block a constitutional amendment supported by the other thirty-five.12

By creating political structures that weakened the role of the federal government’s ability to regulate slavery, the framers hobbled Washington’s ability to pass legislation on a host of other matters.

The federal government didn’t acquire the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes” until 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified.

Of course, the founders could not see this far ahead—how the political concessions made to protect the human property in the Constitution would fundamentally shape the nation’s economy and the political institutions that governed it.

A key factor that made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor.

“Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered.31 A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop as American money exerted its will on the earth, bringing floods and erosion, erasing natural habitats, and otherwise spoiling the environment for profit.32

During this period, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his book Flush Times and Fever Dreams. That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs, and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us catastrophic downturns, like the Panic of 1837, the stock market crash of 1929, and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions.36

Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States.

as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written.86 It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for, a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter or a means to get ahead.

They fought only for America to let them be marooned—left alone— in their own unchained, singing, worthy blood.

By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans. By midcentury, the historian Manisha Sinha notes in The Counterrevolution of Slavery, it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population held enslaved people.7

Rich enslavers were essentially the only people who could participate in the highest levels of government.

Tea Party politicians, like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, would come to Washington in 2011 with demands for spending cuts and balanced budgets. But a close examination of the beliefs of Tea Party activists shows a movement consumed with resentment toward an ascendant majority of Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and liberal white people. In Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, their survey-based study of the movement, for example, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”

You could make the case that none of this has anything to do with slavery and enslavers’ ideology. You could argue that it has nothing to do with race at all, that it’s simply an aggressive effort to secure conservative victories. But the tenor of an argument, the shape and nature of an opposition movement—these things matter. Republicans stepped onto this path after America elected its first Black president, and they thereafter embraced a racist demagogue and his attacks on the legitimacy of the nation’s multiracial character; these actions speak to how the threads of history tie past and present together.

the price of equality, or at least of the promise of an equal society, is vigilance against those who would make government the tool of hierarchy. And, in turn, we must recognize that this struggle—to secure democracy against privilege on the one hand, and to secure privilege against democracy on the other—is the unresolvable conflict of American life. It is the push and pull that will last for as long as the republic stands.

Know, my sweet friend, that I have not abandoned you or the cause of liberty. My hands, my arms, my feet, my legs, my eyes, my ears, and my heart are all unwitting weapons of resistance.

The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, committed to preserving the United States as a white man’s country by ensuring that Black Americans would not become citizens.

Congress responded by promulgating the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which opened with a declaration of citizenship as birthright: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” This phrasing acknowledged that most Native peoples were citizens of their own sovereign nations. For Black Americans, now neither race nor color nor “previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude” disqualified them from claiming new, affirmative rights: “To make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.”42

Moreover, in the South, which had large enslaved populations, everyone understood that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” was to suppress uprisings of the enslaved. Though it did not explicitly say so, the Second Amendment was motivated in large part by a need for the new federal government to assure white people in the South that they would be able to defend themselves against Black people.

Black women participated too, most notably one well-armed conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman; a Union spy, she led as many as 300 Black soldiers in destroying a Confederate supply depot on the Combahee River on June 2, 1863.61

Enraged that Black people had the audacity to defend themselves, white officials called in the 4th Tennessee Infantry Regiment, which then leveled one machine-gun blast after the next into Black homes and businesses.

In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and victim is Black than the other way around.102 In fact, the report notes that when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a “justifiable homicide” than a white-on-white killing.103 A joint analysis by the Giffords Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center, citing the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report, summed up the results: “the consequences are predictably deadly and unequal.”

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth: this country contains 4 percent of the planet’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners.

Angola is immense, larger than the island of Manhattan, covering land once occupied by plantations where enslaved Black people were forced to labor.

Incarcerated people in most states have no right to counsel for post-conviction appeals, so EJI ended up taking on close to sixty cases in Louisiana. In other states, because of mandatory sentencing and three-strikes laws, I have found myself representing people sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. For a nation that prides itself on being exceptionally committed to freedom, America has produced an endless list of harsh, extreme, and cruel sentences, across the fifty states, for minor and major crimes.

As the Supreme Court of Alabama explained in an 1861 ruling, enslaved Black people were “capable of committing crimes,” and in that capacity were “regarded as persons,” but in most every other sense they were “incapable of performing civil acts” and considered “things, not persons.”

In 1933, a white mob lynched Elizabeth Lawrence near Birmingham for daring to chastise white children who were throwing rocks at her.

In Germany, there has been a meaningful reckoning with the history of the Holocaust; this sort of reflection and remembrance has been largely absent in America, where many people resist confronting the most disturbing and difficult parts of our past.

we are at one of those critical moments in American history when we will either double down on romanticizing a false narrative about our violent past or accept that there is something better waiting for us, if we can learn to deal honestly with our history.

people are wrong when they reduce other human beings to nothing more than their worst act.

Black people still bear the burden of presumptive guilt.

A society recovering from a history of horrific human rights violations must make a commitment to truth and justice. As long as we deny the legacy of slavery and avoid this commitment, we will fail to overcome the racially biased, punitive systems of control that have become serious barriers to freedom in this country. It’s tempting for some to believe otherwise, but much work remains.

Greenwood Jasmine Mans The whistle of an unnatural wind gave word there would be a lynching, of a Negro boy who shined shoes, not a rapist, just a boy, a child boy, teenage boy, nineteen-year-old boy still fresh in his days. And a wind that would not know the enormity of its crime until morning filled air with turpentine. – An invasion led by Klansmen, a hate that would outdo itself to a menacing ritual of fire, wood, and blood. The bombs turned clouds into shadows of themselves. Single-engine aircrafts hovered so low the bodies under them thought the world was ending, and how could it not be “Run, Negro!” Thirty-five(ish) blocks, and a flame that spent days burning itself tired, Three hundred (ish) Black folks murdered into anonymity. Greenwood has a soggy, muck clay, a damp inconsistency of earth, Constitution, and bone. Some buried, homeless, in Oaklawn, some trampled beneath the dirt. A history tucked away in attic floorboards long enough to forget all it once was. America has a way of dancing with its own delusion. Unable to keep count of its murders because it, then, would have to keep count of its murderers, its good neighbors. All insurance claims denied to the residents of Greenwood and business owners of Black Wall Street. And, left, a people holding their memory through tongue folklore, blood, postcard, church tale. A people chasing a memory that wasn’t supposed to become a memory at all.