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”

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.