The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Black people, however, were largely absent from the histories I read. The vision of the past I absorbed from school textbooks, television, and the local history museum depicted a world, perhaps a wishful one, where Black people did not really exist. This history rendered Black Americans, Black people on all the earth, inconsequential at best, invisible at worst. We appeared only where unavoidable: slavery was mentioned briefly in the chapter on this nation’s most deadly war, and then Black people disappeared again for a full century, until magically reappearing as Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech about a dream.

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.

She came out of a violent storm with a story no one believed…. A year before the arrival of the celebrated Mayflower, 113 years before the birth of George Washington, 244 years before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, this ship sailed into the harbor at Jamestown, Virginia, and dropped anchor into the muddy waters of history. It was clear to the men who received this “Dutch man of War” that she was no ordinary vessel. What seems unusual today is that no one sensed how extraordinary she really was. For few ships, before or since, have unloaded a more momentous cargo.

I had assumed that Before the Mayflower referred to Black people’s history in Africa before they were enslaved on this land. Tracing my fingers across the words, I realized that the title evoked not a remote African history but an American one. 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. Why hadn’t any teacher or textbook, in telling the story of Jamestown, taught us the story of 1619? No history can ever be complete, of course. Millions of moments, thousands of dates weave the tapestry of a country’s past. But I knew immediately, viscerally, that this was not an innocuous omission. 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.

Profits from Black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. The relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing of their bodies and the products of their forced labor would help make Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance, and trading sector, and New York City a financial capital of the world.13

The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved Black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved people from Africa for a term of twenty years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved, and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had escaped and sought refuge there.44

With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it.53 The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a further consolidation of whiteness across class, religious, and ethnic lines, and a hardening of the racial caste system. American democracy had been created on the backs of unfree Black labor.54 Blackness came to define whiteness—and whiteness defined American democracy prior to the Civil War.

Racist justifications for slavery gained ground during the mid-nineteenth century. The majority of the Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, declaring that Black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them permanently inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. 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. If Black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

In response to Black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses, and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.

“White gold,” as sugar was called, drove trade in goods and people, fueled the wealth of European nations, and, for the British in particular, shored up the financing of the North American colonies. Over the span of nearly three hundred years, from the mid-sixteenth century on, a succession of European nations—Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Britain—plied an international slave trade, with African elites and dealers on one side of the ocean and an insatiable demand by white colonists for enslaved labor on the other.

American slavers were the last to enter the trade. But from the ports of Rhode Island, beginning in 1709 and lasting officially to 1807, Rhode Islanders managed to make nearly a thousand voyages to Africa, procuring 106,544 enslaved people.

American colonists opened direct lines of trade that didn’t resemble a triangle at all. They traded directly with England, delivering mainland commodities produced by enslaved labor, such as rice, tobacco, and cotton, as well as flour and lumber, and returned home with manufactured goods and luxury items. On separate voyages, American colonists also exported North Atlantic dried cod, flour, and pine wood to plantations in the British West Indies, in exchange for sugar and molasses.

Molasses was a key part of the sugar trade.

It was crucial to the manufacturing of desserts, sweet rolls and buns, and other processed foods. It was also the key ingredient in the making of rum. And rum was the lubricant that helped make the international slave trade run like a well-oiled machine.

Americans excelled at fermenting and distilling molasses to make millions of gallons of rum, which American-built slave ships, often called “rum vessels,” brought to West Africa, among other places, to trade for African captives.35 Aside from being an essential “naval ration” in the Age of Sail, rum was “an essential part of the cargo of the slave ship, particularly the colonial American slave ship,” writes the historian Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery. “It was profitable to spread a taste for liquor on the coast. The Negro dealers were plied with it, were induced to drink till they lost their reason, and then the bargain was struck.”36

The New England colonies, led by Rhode Island, operated several distilleries, which produced millions of gallons of rum and brought huge fortunes to white Americans.37 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 islands,” write Aronson and Budhos.38 John Adams observed that the British Parliament had gone too far with its revenue scheme. “Molasses was an essential ingredient of American independence,” Adams would later write.

This was not a surge of purposeless criminality, as many white observers claimed; it was a sustained revolt. Throughout American history, white mob violence had been understood as thoroughly political in nature. It was obvious to everyone concerned that white people frequently became enraged when their status or power was threatened, and that they were willing to maintain the racial order through violence—including burning buildings, looting homes, and attacking or lynching Black people. But when Black rebellions swept our nation, they were cast as deviant, criminal, and irrational. Hinton observes, “It was only when white people no longer appeared to be the driving force behind rioting in the nation’s cities, and when Black collective violence against exploitative and repressive institutions surfaced, that ‘riots’ came to be seen as purely criminal, and completely senseless, acts.”

Echoing Thomas Jefferson more than a century after he’d warned of the dangers of holding a “wolf by the ear,” Johnson said of the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “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.”

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.”

The Americans inherited a grab bag of strategies for dealing with Indigenous peoples from the English, who had generally viewed Native nations as separate political bodies with prior occupancy of the soil. But the British also saw Native people as unchristian “heathens” and as “savages” who had not actually developed the land in a civilized manner that would qualify them as rightful owners.

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.

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies. Some are more equitable, and some are more exploitative; some more restrained, and some more unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society”—as a real estate mogul told the Miami Herald in 2018 when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts—what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal version of capitalism: “low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it.2 In a capitalist society like ours, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods, and so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions. Inequality reigns and poverty spreads.

The United States stands today as one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (those eighteen to sixty-five) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Scores in these categories run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). When it comes to regulations on temporary workers, Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand 3.7, signaling that in those countries, workers enjoy a range of toothy protections; farther down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5), and Japan (1.3). The United States scores 0.3, tied for second-to-last place with Malaysia. What about how easy it is to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of seventy-one nations, with a score of 0.5.4

When private property extends to human beings, however, a particularly strong and expansive set of protections is required. Human beings, after all, can run away or revolt. The founders recognized this, and in the Constitution they safeguarded the human property of those who owned enslaved people through a number of provisions. Article I, Section 8 granted Congress the power to summon the militia to “suppress insurrections,” understood to mean rebellions of the enslaved.19 Article I, Section 9 forbade Congress from ending the slave trade until 1808. Article V, Section 2 prohibited free states from emancipating runaways: human property in the South would remain human property in the North. The framers helped create a doctrine of private property strong enough to justify and enforce human trafficking, so much so that abolitionists publicly burned copies of the Constitution.

The 1812 case Hezekiah Wood v. John Davis and Others concerned the situation of John Davis, a Black man born to a mother who had never been enslaved. According to the law of matrilineal descent, this should have established Davis’s own freedom, but Wood, an enslaver who claimed Davis as his property, argued that he had purchased Davis before his mother had proven her freedom. The Court sided with Wood.

The following year, the Court’s decision in the case of Mima Queen and Child v. Hepburn denied Black people the right to provide hearsay evidence that supported their freedom claims, prioritizing the propertied interests of enslavers over the lives of people those enslavers claimed belonged to them.20 The Court’s vigorous defense of human bondage, encased in property law, continued as amendments were added to the Constitution. The Fifth Amendment, which prohibited Congress from depriving anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without due process,” informed the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold slavery in its infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case.

In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. In Italy, 34 percent of workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. But only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. 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.

As some of the world’s first white industrial proletarians searched for a language to voice their grievances, they found traction in analogies to chattel slavery. Mill hands worked hours similar to those imposed on enslaved field hands, from dawn to dusk, and were dependent on factory owners for sustenance. In 1845, a labor newspaper referred to mill workers as “white slaves of capital.” An immigrant from Germany, a shoemaker, put it this way: “We are free, but not free enough.”76 At inception, the American labor movement defined itself as a movement of and for white workers, a bulwark against their downward slide into “wage slavery,” Blackness, and un-freedom. “Do not let them make niggers out of you,”

To do so he employed a novel conception of the Constitution. For Calhoun there was no “Union” per se. Instead, the United States was simply a compact among sovereigns with distinct, and often competing, sectional interests. This compact could survive only if all sides had equal say about the meaning of the Constitution and the shape and structure of the law. Individual states, Calhoun thought, should be able to veto federal laws if they believed the federal government had favored one state or section over another. The Union could act only with the assent of the entire whole—what Calhoun called “the concurrent majority.” This was in opposition to the Madisonian idea of rule by numerical majority, albeit mediated by compromise and consensus.

In her 2019 book Biased, the Stanford University psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt shows that African Americans are consistently perceived as a threat.16 In one 2004 study, she and her colleagues cued subjects with pictures of African American faces, white faces, or no facial images at all, then progressively unblurred images of various objects, including weapons, and asked them to identify what they saw. The results found that subjects more quickly identified the weapons when cued with Black faces than they did when prompted with white faces. Eberhardt summarizes this study, noting “the stereotypic association between blacks and crime influences not only how we see black people but how we see guns.”

September 15, 1883 A conductor on a train traveling from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, insists that Ida B. Wells leave her seat in the first-class rear car and move to the rougher front car, where drinking and smoking are permitted. Wells refuses and is forcibly removed from the train. Afterward, she sues the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad Company. She wins and is awarded $500 in damages, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturns the ruling. Afterward, she writes, “O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?”

Even emancipated and free-born Black people were often considered to be presumptive fugitives to be hunted, captured, and sold into slavery. As one nineteenth-century court ruled, “The presumption arising from the color of a person indicating African descent is, that he is a slave.”10 Some Northern states and territories, including Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon, banned the immigration of free Black people; some Southern states required that enslaved people who obtained freedom from their enslavers leave the state, to avoid any confusion about what Black people represented in American society.

As the Supreme Court of Alabama explained in an 1861 ruling, enslaved Black people were “capable of committing crimes,” and in that capacity were “regarded as persons,” but in most every other sense they were “incapable of performing civil acts” and considered “things, not persons.”11

November 10, 1898 A mob of more than one thousand white men overthrows the elected biracial local government in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the only successful coup in American history. Organized by white supremacist politicians virulently opposed to the prospect of elected Black city officials, the mob destroys a thriving Black business district, kills scores of Black people, and drives thousands from their homes; many of them will never return.

May 31, 1921 Following the arrest of a young Black man who had ridden in an elevator with a white woman, a confrontation erupts between groups of Black and white citizens at the courthouse in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In response, mobs of white residents, some armed by the city, completely destroy the Greenwood District, then one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, known as Black Wall Street, and kill hundreds of Black citizens.

1925 Alain Locke publishes The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on the art and literature of what will come to be called the Harlem Renaissance. Locke, a philosopher and professor at Howard University, spent much of the decade debating the purpose of art with W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois contended that all art was propaganda; Locke believed that it was “a tap root of vigorous, flourishing living,” and that the creative explosion of the 1920s represented a new phase of Black life in America.

1932 The United States Public Health Service begins the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male with more than 600 subjects, approximately two-thirds of whom have syphilis. White doctors tell their subjects only that they are being treated for “bad blood.” Ultimately, 128 men die from the disease and related complications; 40 of their wives are also infected and 19 of their children are born with the disease. It is later revealed that for research purposes, the men were denied drugs that could have saved them.

Why would this be the case? For centuries, white physicians and scientists went to great lengths to prove that Black bodies were biologically and physiologically different from white bodies.10 To be clear, “different” almost always meant inferior. These physicians and scientists used their expertise and even empirical data to insist that enslaved Africans were “fit” for slavery and that the institution was not immoral or cruel, as many proclaimed.11 Over time, their theories became incorporated into and normalized in medical practice, and this racializing of medicine did not end after slavery. Two persistent physiological falsehoods—that Black people were impervious to pain and that they had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work—have wormed their way into the scientific consensus, and can still be seen in modern-day medical education and practice. A study of 222 white medical students and residents published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 showed that half of the students and residents endorsed at least one false idea about biological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than those of white people.

Other unproven theories persist as well. One-third of the medical students surveyed in the 2016 study published by the National Academy of Sciences still believed the lie that Thomas Hamilton tortured John Brown to try to prove nearly two centuries ago: that Black skin is thicker than white skin.32 Even after many reckonings with its racist past, our medical establishment still has not fully accepted how the distorted beliefs that were born during slavery play a role in creating healthcare inequality today. As a result, scientists, doctors, and other medical providers—and those training to fill such positions in the future—are often unaware of their own complicity in perpetuating the internalized racism and the conscious and unconscious biases that drive them to go against their oath to do no harm.

We have long understood the crisis of poor health outcomes for Black Americans as a problem of race. But this implies an inferiority of Black bodies or Black culture. What happened to Dr. Moore speaks to the pervasive, long-running racial bias in the U.S. healthcare system, an erroneous set of deep-seated beliefs formulated during slavery and perpetuated over the decades since by social, political, and economic inequality. In reality, 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. That is how Black people get killed.

August 28, 1955 Two white men kidnap, beat, torture, and murder Emmett Till after the fourteen-year-old interacts with a white woman in a store in Money, Mississippi. The following month, the men, who will later admit to their crime, are acquitted by an all-white jury. Several months after this, Rosa Parks launches the Montgomery bus boycott.

When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no. Not God bless America! God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!2

Cone’s theology grew out of an even older prophetic tradition. Over the centuries, Black preachers in America have used their pulpits just like Wright did, to challenge the hypocrisy of white America’s racism, sometimes with harsh language. Black preaching by historical necessity used the jeremiad, a rhetorical mode of denunciation or chastisement about the corruption of people, events, or nations that stretches back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. More than two thousand years later, in the antebellum United States, Black preachers castigated the nation for the evils of slavery. Preaching in the Black church was primarily done by men, in part because of religious prohibitions barring women from the pulpit.6 And while Black preachers generally did not confront the issue of unfairness regarding gender, they repeatedly confronted the moral ills of a society built on chattel slavery.

James “Bubber” Miley making his trumpet swoon in Ellington’s absurdly sensual “The Mooche” in 1928; Ethel Waters, once among the highest-paid women in entertainment, smiling through the melancholy of “Am I Blue” in 1929; Fats Waller’s ooze-and-attack stride piano, eight years later, on “The Joint Is Jumpin’ ”; Ella Fitzgerald finding herself alongside the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb, perfecting a luscious emotional language whose street name was “scat”; Webb’s band battling Count Basie’s in a live contest at the Savoy Ballroom in 1938, transforming the music’s orchestral sound into an Olympics of kinetic innovation.5

Sam Cooke imagined a pop music that induced hyperventilating yet never dared remove its choral robe. It was lush, impassioned, and nestled in the palatable harmonies of 1940s and 1950s serenades and doo-wop singing. Neither hot jazz nor fiery sermon but a dozen roses, a milkshake with two straws. Cooke’s arrangements were a perfect fusion between the sacred and the secular, between robust Blackness and the American songbook’s high snuggle era. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cooke embodied Black pop singing’s seamless transition from wailing choirboy to romantic heat source. Motown went a step further. The chapel became a power station.

Gordy oversaw a full-scale integration of Western, classical orchestral instruments (strings, horns, woodwinds) with the Black musical experience: church on a Sunday morning (rhythm sections, gospel harmonies, hand claps) and juke-joint Saturday nights (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). Pure yet busy. What resulted was the Motown sound: a whole daggone weekend in three minutes.

Aretha Franklin, Quincy Jones, Jimmy Heath, Jimmy Smith, B. B. King, James Brown, Etta James, Inez and Charlie Foxx, Jimi Hendrix, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Dionne Warwick, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Ornette Coleman, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Merry Clayton, Pharoah Sanders, Yusef Lateef, Gamble & Huff, the O’Jays, Maurice White, Philip Bailey, Teddy Pendergrass, Herbie Hancock, Roberta Flack, Alice Coltrane, Minnie Riperton, George Benson, Phoebe Snow, Donny Hathaway, the Isley Brothers, Funkadelic, Charly Pride, Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, Nona Hendryx, Carl Anderson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, The 5th Dimension, Betty Davis, Al Green, Nick Ashford, Valerie Simpson, Melba Moore, Nile Rodgers, Larry Levan, Buddy Guy, Lionel Richie, Sylvester, Al Jarreau, Bill Withers, Michael Jackson, David Washington, Cecil Taylor, Natalie Cole, Gwen Guthrie, Donna Summer, Phyllis Hyman, Stanley Clarke, Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly, Bad Brains, Prince, Grandmaster Flash, Millie Jackson, Cherrelle, Patti Austin, Klymaxx, Kurtis Blow, Full Force, Shirley Caesar, Luther Vandross, Stephanie Mills, Andraé Crouch, Jennifer Holliday, Bettye LaVette, Peabo Bryson, Cheryl Lynn, Fishbone, James Ingram, Anita Baker, Rick James, Eric B. and Rakim, LL Cool J, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Janet Jackson, the Clark Sisters, MC Lyte, Babyface, Whitney Houston, Wynton Marsalis, KRS-One, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, Bobby McFerrin, Jody Watley, Teddy Riley, Tracy Chapman, Lenny Kravitz, Public E...

“A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”

But wealthy Black enclaves were targeted as well. Auburn Avenue, which once housed so many Black-owned businesses that Fortune magazine called it “the richest Negro street in the world,” was devastated by the creation of the Downtown Connector.6 “Sweet Auburn,” the home to prominent institutions like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, had long stood as the core of Black Atlanta, but the intrusions of the interstate proved to be a “deathblow,” in the words of one local.7 The original plans for the Downtown Connector plotted a path directly through the headquarters of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the crown jewel of the city’s Black business community. The objections of Black leaders succeeded in shifting the route a few blocks east, but the highway still tore through Auburn Avenue, displacing residents and destroying businesses.8 This common practice of steering new interstates through minority neighborhoods—rich and poor alike—was repeated across the South in cities like Charlotte, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, Montgomery, Nashville, New Orleans, Richmond, and Tampa.