The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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.

“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.”

Slavery existed before the Constitution…. Slaveholders took a large share in making it.” Two years later, Douglass announced a “change in opinion,” believing that a stronger political argument could be made not by condemning our founding document for supporting slavery but by claiming that slavery was antithetical to the Constitution and that the Constitution was, in fact, as he would go on to argue, a “glorious liberty document.”

rare white men such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner who truly believed in Black equality—viewed Reconstruction as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purge the republic of the legacy of slavery.”74

The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance and visions for equality. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but Black people did.

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

Virginia’s House of Burgesses makes interracial marriage punishable by imprisonment. Over the next decade, Virginia and other colonies continue to pass laws restricting or prohibiting marriage between white and Black people. No such laws exist in England at the time. They are unique to the North American colonies and help create a racial caste system that strictly forbids interracial relationships of all kinds.

Hugh Davis, a white man, ordered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1630 for “abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a Negress.”

The Virginia House of Burgesses—the first elected legislature in the colonies—met to debate the question. According to the patriarchal mandates of British inheritance and kinship law, the children should have had the status of their white fathers.

The legislative laws defining race began before a country began.

The white enslaver crafted a “convenient game,” wrote Lydia Maria Child, a Massachusetts abolitionist, that “enables him to fill his purse by means of his own vices.”18

This comment is cited; The white enslaver crafted a “convenient game,” wrote Lydia Maria Child, a Massachusetts abolitionist, that “enables him to fill his purse by means of his own vices.”18 Hannah-Jones, Nikole; The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project (p. 50). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Census records show that in 1850, roughly 11 percent of the enslaved population was classified as mulatto.34

May 10, 1740 The South Carolina Commons House of Assembly passes the Negro Act, making it illegal for enslaved Africans to move freely, assemble in groups, grow food, earn money, or learn to read and write. These restrictions come in response to the Stono Rebellion, the largest uprising of enslaved people in the colonies to date. It was spearheaded the previous year by a man named Jemmy, who was most likely Kongolese. Jemmy led a band of roughly twenty men southward from the Stono River, killing white people, burning plantations, and recruiting new fighters along the way. Their goal was to reach Spanish Florida, which offered freedom to fugitives, but before they could escape South Carolina, they were defeated by a white militia.

Fear of the black man began when enslaved people revolted, and those fears remain with America to this current day.

From finance to finished goods, the transatlantic trade spawned a dizzying array of British businesses, manufacturing ships and armaments, glass and iron, linens and pottery, and distilling rum and beer, which would be sold in Africa, the West Indies, and North America, as well as at home in the British Isles.8

world. From the first time Royal African Company slavers set sail for North America, through the years of the American Revolution, until the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, roughly three million souls, many of them forever branded with the company’s initials, RAC, on their bodies, would be forcibly removed from their homes, their kin, and their way of life, the majority of them to feed demand for a sweetener.

One measure of the horrors of kidnapping captives is evidenced by the British Parliament outlawing it in 1750.19

John Newton, a slave trader turned abolitionist who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,”

March 5, 1770 A confrontation between colonists and British soldiers erupts outside the Boston Custom House. In the ensuing melee, Crispus Attucks, a fugitive from slavery now employed as a dockworker, becomes the first colonist to die for the cause of independence. The event, which comes to be known as the Boston Massacre, is one of the factors that turns the colonies against British rule and leads to the American Revolution.

Violent insurrection, however, was not the only fear seizing the minds of many white Southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War.

America fearing the past continues to this day.

Poor white people feared that the abolition of slavery would erase the line that separated them from the most abused and despised people on earth.

Southern states swiftly reinvented their tools for racial control and enacted “Black Codes” that were akin to the old slave codes. As expressed by one Alabama planter:

These codes segregated schools and prohibited, for example, interracial seating in the first-class sections of railroad cars.

Vagrancy laws were adopted and selectively enforced against Black people; these essentially made it a criminal offense not to work, often forcing formerly enslaved people to sign labor contracts with the same people who had once enslaved them.

“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.”

Just as in the days of the Haitian Revolution and before, nothing frightened and enraged white people more than Black people who were determined to be free.

“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.”90 In a July 1967 speech about Black rebellions in Detroit and Newark, he condemned the violence as criminal but also admitted that “the only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence.”

Indian Removal Act, since the Three-fifths Clause of the U.S. Constitution (which apportioned additional representation in Congress for numbers of enslaved people owned) increased the voting power of Southern white residents who sought Native land.

This information should be in every American history book.

What pro-slavery advocates feared most was democracy itself: that Northern majorities would use the power of the federal government to dismantle slavery. This fear shaped our political institutions in ways still felt today.

Congress would be divided into two houses, a lower house based on population—with each enslaved Black person counting as three-fifths of a citizen—and an upper house that gave all states an equal number of votes.

If the founding men of this country compromised on slavery, it's hard to understand how current-day politicians cannot compromise on issues of today.

“Our Slaves being our Property,” argued South Carolina representative Thomas Lynch, “why should they be taxed more than the Land, Sheep, Cattle, Horses?” Lynch and other Southerners wanted their human property to count toward their congressional representation but not against their tax bill.

Capitalists leveraged slavery and its racial legacy to divide workers—free from unfree, white from Black—diluting their collective power. Instead of resisting this strategy, white-led unions embraced it until it was too late, undercutting their movement and creating conditions for worker exploitation and inequality that exist to this day.

Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.”

An American labor movement did emerge in the nineteenth century, but it failed to bring about the kinds of sweeping reforms and political transformations that remade Western Europe.72

Income inequality decreases when unionization increases, as a result of organized labor fighting for better pay for the rank and file and keeping employer power in check.74

The United States remains the sole advanced democracy missing a Labor Party, one dedicated, at least in original conception, to representing the interests of the working classes.

The ultimate fear and nightmare for American capitalism are Labor Unions that equalize America's voting citizens.

Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.

The conquer and divided process of capitalistic profiters easiest agenda. Sadly the two groups of American voters will never understand or appreciate their worth and power in American society.

The court’s decision dealt a blow to the Black American claim to citizenship: Taney ruled that Scott had no right to sue because as an enslaved person, he was not a citizen. Taney then went a step further. No Black American was intended to be a citizen of the United States by the framers. It was a powerful repudiation of the interpretation of the Constitution long promoted by Black activists. The nation’s highest court declared that Blackness rendered them unequivocally noncitizens.28

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

Harriet Tubman's face should adorn American currency to remind American citizens of an African American rescuer of enslaved people and a Civil War hero.

Many had held on to their wartime firearms and resisted the neo-Confederate government’s demand to disarm. They fought back as white state militias and paramilitary organizations worked closely with local governments to seize their weapons.64 Black people asserted, in publications such as The Christian Recorder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and The Loyal Georgian, that they had Second Amendment rights and that stripping them of their guns was denying them the right to self-defense.

White politicians violated the 2nd amendment stripping former Black Civil War Soldiers of their weapons. The NRA nor the Republican party will ever acknowledge these facts to prove their point of how the government will come for their weapons.

Enslaved people were punished for learning to read, for questioning their enslavement, or when rumors of escape or rebellion surfaced.

In 1740, South Carolina lawmakers restricted some of the most barbaric punishments that had emerged and imposed civil fines on enslavers who “cut out the tongue, put out the eye, castrate, or cruelly scald, burn, or deprive any slave of any limb or member,” but it still authorized “whipping or beating with horse whip, cow skin, switch or small stick, or putting irons on, or confining or imprisoning.”

The white person most frequently identified as the father of the art form is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T. D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy’’ Rice, “the negro, par excellence.”20 Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork in grotesque approximation of the enslaved Black people he was imitating.

one version of the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old Black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song, the horse groomer became who Rice needed him to be. “Weel about and turn about jus so,” went his tune, “ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” And just like that, this white man had invented the character who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.

A blackface minstrel would sing, dance, play music, give speeches, and cut up for white audiences, almost exclusively in the North, at least initially. Blackface was used for mock operas and political monologues (they called them stump speeches), skits, gender parodies, and dances. Its stars were the nineteenth-century versions of Elvis, the Beatles, ’N Sync.

It was, on the one hand, harmless fun: men in silly clothes and garish makeup inventing a kind of sketch-comedy variety show. But the audience’s prolonged exposure to these images normalized their intended hideousness.

Night after night, for six solid decades at least, audience upon audience looked on gleefully, and the false ideas being told about Black people took on lives of their own.

During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster composed the tunes the minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing more than a century later, like “Oh! Susanna,” “Dixie,” “Camptown Races,” “Swanee River,” and “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!” Edwin Pearce Christy’s group, Christy’s Minstrels, formed a band—banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine—whose combination of instruments laid the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown.

One accelerant was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.28 The book’s florid anti-slavery pleas jolted the nation and loaned minstrelsy a new urgency.

The caricatures of Black people as extravagantly lazy, licentious, vulgar, disheveled, and abject always drew a comforting contrast with a white person’s sense of honor and civility, with a white person’s simply being white. No matter how bad things might be for us, at least we’re not them.