The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

American society also became obsessed with a destructive fear of Black criminality. The call for law and order gave way to the War on Drugs beginning in the 1970s, and to mass incarceration in the 1980s and ’90s. Meanwhile, police violence persisted and new forms of voter suppression

The Northern states gradually emancipated enslaved Black people in the early United States—a step forward for justice—but at the same time these states gradually or immediately stripped freed Black people of their civil or voting rights—a step forward for injustice.

1865, Congress abolished chattel slavery—stepping toward justice—but this immediately led to a series of racist “Black Codes” in Southern states

Jefferson himself freed only two enslaved people in his lifetime.22 Americans in both the North and the South came to see slavery as a necessary evil, the only way to pay off their debts and build the new nation.

This new form of racial progress envisioned the United States as a white ethnostate that avoided what Jefferson argued would be a never-ending race war. Black people should “be brought up” until “the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the times should render most proper.” To replace them, the nation should “send vessels…to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants,” Jefferson wrote.

John Randolph argued that colonization would “materially tend to secure” slavery, casting off those free Black people whose presence incited “mischief” and “discontent” among the enslaved.25 The eighth Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Henry Clay, agreed in his speech at the meeting. The society would ignore the “delicate question” of abolition and only promote the deportation of the free Black population,

viewed colonization as incremental progress. Enslaved or free Africans would be civilized and gradually emancipated and sent back to Africa to civilize “miserable” Africans,

“The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known,” Tocqueville wrote in his classic 1835 treatise, Democracy

1858, Lincoln appeased the racist ideas of Illinois voters by announcing, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” In the same speech, Lincoln expressed a belief in “a physical difference between the white and black races” that would “forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”37

But when it became a military necessity to save the Union, Lincoln issued and signed the Emancipation Proclamation. While 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.

“The negro has saved himself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed around this time, “and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you.”

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.

In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racist discrimination in public places and public facilities,

Southern states.45 Finally, with the Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction was brought to a close, the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and Jim Crow was born. As

President’s Committee on Civil Rights, one of the most powerful indictments of racism ever to come from the U.S. government—a sign of progress in the midst of racism.

United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Paris. The petition documented 152 killings (or lynchings) and 344 other genocidal crimes against African Americans from 1945 to 1951.

The racial-progress story becomes quite familiar from there. In 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

“You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress.”59 Malcolm X and

it was not surprising when, five days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, police brutality set off the six-day Watts Rebellion against racism, one of the most destructive urban rebellions in U.S. history.

Conservatives framed supporters of affirmative action as “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination” against white people,

the century’s end, the term “color-blind” was often being used by politicians and thinkers to describe the correct way to think about race,

telling Black Americans to stop playing “the race card.”

On January 10, 2000, the Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson guaranteed that by 2050 the United States “will have problems aplenty. But no racial problem whatsoever.”

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cut that time period in half in a 2003 case upholding some forms of affirmative action in university admissions. “We expect that 25 years from now,” she wrote, “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

President Obama told Americans that “we’re not where we need to be.” But he assured the nation, “The long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some.”

arc of the moral universe is indeed long, and as Obama observed, it doesn’t bend on its own. The people bend it toward justice or injustice, toward equity or inequity.

“I speak Americans for your good. We must and shall be free I say, in spite of you. You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery, to enrich you and your children, but God will deliver us from under you. And wo,

wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.”

Ida B. Wells, who with her fiery pen condemned lynching and violent and legal efforts

Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black woman in Mississippi, the most oppressive apartheid state in America, thrown off her land and beaten repeatedly for demanding the right to vote, who in 1964 said, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

President Lyndon Johnson, architect of the Great Society, explained in a 1965 speech titled “To Fulfill These Rights”: “Negro poverty is not white poverty…. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they

a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.”

The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced

labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans,

just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s ...

justify the extraction of profit. Beginning in the 1660s, white officials ensured that all children born to enslaved women would also be enslaved for life and would belong not to their mothers but to the white men who owned their mothers.

“Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the [Emancipation] proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.”

The key to that, Frazier said, was land. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land,

Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, providing for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of acres of former Confederate land in forty-acre tracts to newly freed people along coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Just four days later, an assassin shot Lincoln, who died the next day. Andrew Johnson, the racist, pro-Southern vice president who took over, immediately reneged upon this promise of forty acres, overturning Sherman’s order.

We still live with the legacy of this choice. As the scholar Henry Louis Gates writes, “Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed.”31

To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property.

We are often taught in school that Lincoln “freed the slaves,” but we are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on,