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.

A 2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called Teaching Hard History found that in 2017 just 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, and less than one-third knew that it had taken a constitutional amendment to abolish it.

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.

Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom.

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.

“shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.”38 If we are a truly great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.

One of the very first to die in the American Revolution was a Black and Indigenous man named Crispus Attucks who himself was not free. In 1770, Attucks lived as a fugitive from slavery, yet he became a martyr for liberty in a land where his own people would remain enslaved for almost another century.

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.

“slavery affected everything about society,” its social relationships, laws, customs, and politics.

Lincoln informed his guests that Congress had appropriated funds—some $600,000—to ship Black people, once freed, to another country.

“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.”

Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education.

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.”

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.”

“What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”