The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

There were certainly no substantial paying Black audiences. A Black minstrel worked in front of white audiences, in white concert halls, on white traveling shows. He would have had no choice but to try to figure out what white audiences wanted. As long as blackface was the country’s cultural juggernaut, who would pay money to see Negroes in their own skin?

Black artist who, understanding the preference in certain corners of the marketplace for sanitized editions of their songs, counted the money as white artists rode Black music up the charts. Bobby and Shirley Womack’s “It’s All Over Now” wasn’t a big hit until the Rolling Stones made it one in 1964; Womack complained until he got his first royalty check.43

Yet hip-hop’s rapid adaptability also proves how little territory Black people are willing to cede, how they continue to expand the landscape, how there has always been something in Black music that’s viscerally attractive yet distinctly elusive, a depth of feeling that the field songs and spirituals instilled, perhaps eternally.

What you’re hearing in what we call Black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that, like the spirituals, can really happen only off the page—not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, break beats, or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise.

This is to say that when we’re talking about Black music, we’re talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or simply can’t lift—centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the treasure you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.

Doesn’t the temptation to take from Blackness make sense, then? Here is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won’t stop but also can’t be stopped.

to other Black people; to kids in working-class England, middle-class Indonesia, and the cités of Paris; to teenagers in Seoul, Mexico City, and Bogotá. If freedom’s ringing, who on earth wouldn’t want to rock that bell?

Trump was not forging a path forward to “make life better.” Instead he represented a racist past they believed the nation had left behind, and his victory a reversal of the gradual racial progress they had been told was the American story.

In 1954, the Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional.

A decade later, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Johnson appointed the former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall to the U....

There were figures like Ed Bradley, who became the first Black White House television correspondent in 1976, and Harold Washington, who became the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 and inspired Obama’s generation.

The American Colonization Society grew into the preeminent racial “reform” organization in the United States by the late 1820s.

By the 1790s, the abolitionist movement that had begun during the era of the American Revolution had ebbed. White abolitionists, in reviving the movement in the 1830s and ’40s, mostly opposed gradual abolition and colonization. Instead, they pushed for immediate emancipation,

Abolitionist enlightenment ideas may stem from witnessing how education was the equalizer for people of color and knowing the indigenous people could have benefited from such enlightenment instead of forced removal from their lands that led to their genocide?

William Lloyd Garrison, who wholeheartedly believed that Black people had “acquired” and would continue to acquire “the esteem, confidence and patronage of the whites, in proportion to [their] increase in knowledge and moral improvement.”

Garrison said, “If you are temperate, industrious, peaceable and pious; if you return good for evil, and blessing for cursing; you will show to the world, that the slaves can be emancipated without danger: but if you are turbulent, idle and vicious, you will put arguments into the mouths of tyrants, and cover your friends with confusion and shame.”

Submissiveness towards an enslaver has never been rewarded with enlightened mental adjustment, legislation, or kindness.

As sectional political tensions over slavery’s expansion heated up in the halls of Congress, some abolitionists established a new rhetorical ground: slavery and anti-Black racism were one and the same, and if slavery ended, racism would vanish as well.

Abraham Lincoln came of age politically in one of these states. As a young Illinois politician, he held both racist and anti-slavery views. He expressed the former and dulled the latter when it suited him politically.

the proclamation opened the door to enrolling around 180,000 Black soldiers in the Union army, it ended up freeing fewer than 200,000 Black people on the day it was signed.

Radical Reconstruction did bring about actual racial progress. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—ending chattel slavery, granting Black people citizenship, and providing Black men the ability to vote—were passed.

constitutional conventions from 1867 to 1869 included Black delegates—about half of whom had been born in slavery—and white and Black elected officials introduced many Southern states’ first publicly funded education systems, penitentiaries, orphanages, and asylums for the mentally ill; expanded women’s rights and guaranteed rights to Black people; and reorganized local governments.

These sentiments were widespread despite the fact that the formerly enslaved escaped their bondage with absolutely nothing. An Illinois newspaper proclaimed, “The negro is now a voter and a citizen. Let him hereafter take his chances in the battle of life.”43 From this point forward, white Americans were ready to blame Black behavior, and not racism and the deprivations of 250 years of enslavement, for persisting racial inequities.

If only the indigenous people were given such opportunities to take back their lands. Greedy, racist white men & women are responsible for the horrors of a country refusing to live up to the words they proclaim to live by.