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.

I wanted people to know the date 1619 and to contemplate what it means that slavery predates nearly every other institution in the United States.

1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That Black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true founding fathers. And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than we do.

Over the course of the war, thousands of enslaved people would join the British—far outnumbering those who joined the Patriot cause.

some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Democracy existed for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” one the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and who had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”56 This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day.

Dred Scott

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855.

14 year old slave who killed her owner because he raped her numerous times.

The hardships these Black children faced were caused primarily by the structural legacies of slavery, poverty, and other social inequities, not their mothers’ stigmatized behavior.

Drug use

Although he was convicted of eighteen of thirty-six counts and sentenced to 263 years in prison, we are left to wonder how many similar assaults of Black women and girls go unaccounted for. An Associated Press state-by-state review prompted by the Holtzclaw case turned up nearly one thousand officers across the country who lost their badges between 2009 and 2014 for sexual misconduct.

The creative work of Black women activists can help lead us toward liberation from this damaging heritage.

colonial legal apparatus treated them as innately unrapeable and their children as innately enslaveable, while the culture justified that barbarity by slandering them as lascivious Jezebels.

One of the great ironies of sugar’s history in the United States is that the brutal work of the enslaved created an industry whose success in producing unhealthy food for mass consumption has taken its greatest toll on Black communities today.

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. Countless fortunes were made.

Eight years before the Boston Tea Party, colonists took part in a lesser-known Rhode Island revolt against the Sugar Act of 1764, which dramatically increased enforcement of duties collected on imported sugar and molasses. Rhode Islanders had avoided paying these taxes by illegally smuggling in molasses for their lucrative rum business from cheaper French West Indian suppliers, bypassing the British West Indies. On April 7, 1765, a group of men blackened their faces to disguise themselves as Native Americans and seized the cargo of the Polly, which included “barrel after barrel of molasses from the sugar

According to Ashley Rogers, the Whitney’s executive director, of the 101 people counted, most were adult men, several were Creole-identified women, and 32 were young children, who could not be sold under Louisiana law unless accompanied by their mothers.

By World War II, many Black people in the sugar-growing regions sought opportunity and autonomy elsewhere, moving from the cane fields in Louisiana to car factories in the North. Today, the number of Black sugar farmers in Louisiana is likely in the single digits.

Since sugar came to these shores, there hasn’t been a time when Black people weren’t getting the short end of the cane stalk. From plantation to farm to table, African Americans have always paid the highest costs for sugar cultivation.

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.”

Lawmakers across the nation enacted legislation to ensure that free Black people would remain firmly in their place, at the bottom of the social order.

Perhaps our nation is finally beginning to face our history, as a new generation of activists challenges us to choose a radically different path forward. The future of Black communities, and our democracy as a whole, depends on us finally getting it right this time.

As a color line hardened and Native people struggled to keep to the free side of it, they were able to leverage political standing as members of nations and economic players that Africans, stolen from their tribes and homelands, could not.

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 Vann family escaped the fire, relinquishing their land and house but not the enslaved people, whom they brought along when they took refuge in their second home in Tennessee. This respite for the Vanns would be short-lived, however, as they and other Cherokees, rich and poor, would be expelled again within five years.

Brought together and then ripped apart by slavery and racism, the futures of Native and Black people would be again entwined in the exodus of the tribes from their lands. Some eighty thousand Indigenous people were driven out of the South and the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the last decade, though, Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Native activists have joined forces in notable ways. In 2015–16, when thousands of Indigenous people and allies from around the world gathered in South Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through Sioux homelands, Black Lives Matter activists joined them there and staged a rally in Chicago.

As a source of the fledgling nation’s financial might, slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.

Slavery shaped the Constitution in profound and lasting ways.

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.

Such side effects of capitalism—“externalities,” the economists call them—are routinely felt today. The Great Recession of 2008 caused the average Black family to lose a third of its wealth, and most Black businesses did not survive the downturn.

In making possible the pursuit of nearly limitless personal fortunes at someone else’s expense, slavery put a cash value on our moral commitments.

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.

America has evolved into one of the world’s most inequitable societies.

last national colored convention on record was held in 1893. There, gathered in Cincinnati, Ohio, some five hundred Black activists upheld a tradition that had begun more than six decades earlier. Delegates stood firm in their belief that they were full and equal citizens before the Constitution. They decried the outrages of the day, including the rise of lynching.

Behind the cases of Bernhard Goetz, George Zimmerman, and Jessie Murray, Jr., is a legacy of laws originally created to make it easier for white people to defend themselves against the Black people they enslaved, who were defined as “dangerous” because they wanted desperately to be free. But when they won their freedom, Black people did not also win the right to defend themselves.

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.

“Sometimes I’ve wondered what my life could have been had he lived.” Looking back on her family’s winding path, she can’t help but dwell on her father’s strenuous efforts to create prosperity for the family, and how they were undermined. “Every time we take a step up,” she said, “there’s someone trying to crush it.”

it’s never been race that predicts the disease and disability that disproportionally afflict Black Americans, but racism. Until we come to terms with the discrimination and inequality in American medicine, Black people will continue to be harmed by the very system that’s supposed to take care of them.

As King so aptly stated in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ” The Black church, pastors and members alike, is still demanding to cash the check of true democracy and freedom.

If freedom’s ringing, who on earth wouldn’t want to rock that bell?

After all the debates and elections and bills and lawsuits, millions of Americans—of every race, ethnicity, and political persuasion—still don’t have health insurance of any kind, and millions more are still forced to ration crucial medications, or to forgo critical procedures, or to choose in some other way between receiving healthcare and meeting other essential needs. In the end, everyone is harmed.

Atlanta’s traffic is at a standstill because its attitude about transit is at a standstill, too. Decades after its interstates were set down with an eye to segregation and its rapid transit system was stunted by white flight, the city—like so many other cities across America—remains stalled in the past.

Inequality lives, in part, because Americans of every generation have been misled into believing that racial progress is inevitable and ongoing. That racial progress is America’s manifest destiny. That racial progress defines the arc of American history since 1619. That “things have changed dramatically.” In fact, this has more often been rhetoric than reality, more often myth than history. Saying that the nation can progress racially is a necessary statement of hope. Saying that the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology, one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress.

Until Americans replace mythology with history, until Americans unveil and halt the progression of racism, an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.