The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Before the Mayflower, by the historian and journalist Lerone Bennett,

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.

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.

denounced the 1619 Project for treating “slavery not as a blemish that the Founders grudgingly tolerated…not as a regrettable chapter in the distant past, but as a living, breathing pattern upon which all American social life is based.” Guelzo then made clear that the source of his antipathy was not just what the project was saying but who was saying it: “It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”

Wow what an asshole

As Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1892 autobiography, “The story of the master never wanted for narrators. The masters, to tell their story, had at call all the talent and genius that wealth and influence could command. They have had their full day in court. Literature, theology, philosophy, law and learning have come willingly to their service, and if condemned, they have not been condemned unheard.” Our part, as Douglass said, “has been to tell the story of the slave.”

As the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David W. Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, our nation’s “glorious remembrance” is “all but overwhelmed by an even more glorious forgetting.”

How do you romanticize a revolution made possible by the forced labor of your ancestors, one that built white freedom on a Black slavery that would persist for another century after Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? I put it something like this a few years ago, while reporting on school resegregation in Alabama: white Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.

when millions of white Americans expressed shock that violent insurrectionists would try to overturn an election in the “world’s oldest democracy,” Black Americans reminded them that violent efforts to subvert U.S. democracy were not novel nor unprecedented and that true democracy has been attempted in this country only since 1965, when after a bloody and deadly decades-long Black freedom struggle, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

August 1619 A ship arrives near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia, which was founded twelve years earlier. The White Lion carries some twenty to thirty captive Africans, who are traded to the Virginia colonists for provisions, making them the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that will become the United States. Among them are a man named Anthony and a woman named Isabella, who gives birth several years later to a child named William.

For the last two and a half centuries, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty.

Natural rights?

Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that Black people were human beings, but over time the enslavers created a network of laws and customs, astounding in both their precision and their cruelty, designed to strip the enslaved of every aspect of their humanity. As the abolitionist William Goodell would write, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves—to Britain. “One need not delve far into the literature of the Revolution to find out that, of all words, the one that persistently, most contentiously, and most flexibly drove the era’s rhetorical engine was slavery,” writes Peter A. Dorsey, a scholar of literature of the American Revolution, in Common Bondage.

The wealthy, educated men who led the revolt against Britain needed to unify the disparate colonists across social class and region. For those leaders, the comparison to slavery constituted a powerful rhetorical tool. “The Crisis is arrivd when we must assert our Rights, or Submit to every Imposition that can be heap’d upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway,” Washington warned in an August 1774 letter to his friend and neighbor Bryan Fairfax.23

As the scholar Patricia Bradley puts it in Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution, “Once transposed into metaphor, slavery could serve to unite white colonists of whatever region under a banner of white exclusivity.”

The specter of their most valuable property absconding to take up arms against them “did more than any other British measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion,” wrote the historian Gerald Horne in The Counter-Revolution of 1776.33 And yet none of this is part of our founding mythology, which conveniently omits the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

As Samuel Johnson, an English writer opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”34

while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians. White sons of Virginia initiated the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The primary authors were all enslavers.

“We normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things—that they are diametrically opposed,” the historian Ira Berlin said. “But what we see here in Virginia in the late seventeenth century, around Bacon’s Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment.”

Virginia and the rest of the American South constituted one of just five “great slave societies” in the history of the world, according to the historian David W. Blight.

In 1776, Virginia held 40 percent of all enslaved people in the mainland colonies. As a result, white free laborers and tenant farmers numbered too few in Virginia to challenge the white men in power. The historian Edmund S. Morgan argues in his classic book American Slavery, American Freedom that well-off white Virginians, most of whom enslaved people, could champion a form of republican representative government defined by the absence of a formal ruling class or monarchy without threatening their own status as elites for one simple reason: they knew that the system of slavery meant that most of the poor in Virginia were enslaved, so they had no legal rights and could never participate in politics.

During the Constitution’s ratification in the 1780s, a few bold Americans of both races sustained a new abolitionist movement. They considered the Constitution deceitful. “The words [are] dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used,” wrote the abolitionist Samuel Bryan. They “are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”45

Douglass had escaped slavery in 1838 and then spent the next three decades fighting to free the rest of his people. He characterized the Constitution as so “cunningly” framed that “no one would have imagined that it recognized or sanctioned slavery. But having a terrestrial, and not a celestial origin, we find no difficulty in ascertaining its meaning in all the parts which we allege relate to 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.”

the fact that the Constitution allowed for Congress to prohibit the external slave trade after a twenty-year period, beginning in 1808, which is often held up as proof of the anti-slavery sentiment of the framers, can be seen in some respects as self-serving. At the time the Constitution was written, enslaved Black people accounted for about 40 percent of the population in Virginia, and in many places in the colony, the enslaved outnumbered white people. Many white Virginians fretted that continuing to import Africans would produce a frighteningly dangerous ratio for a white population well aware of the possibility of deadly insurrections.

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.

Prior to becoming president, as a lawyer and politician in Illinois, Lincoln himself had believed that free Black people amounted to a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people.

Eventually, some two hundred thousand Black Americans would serve in the Union, accounting for one in ten Union soldiers.

Remarkably, in 1873 the University of South Carolina became the only state-sponsored college in the South to fully integrate, becoming majority Black—just like the state itself—by 1876. (When white former Confederates regained power a year later, they closed the university. After three years, they reopened it as an all-white institution; it would remain that way for nearly a century, until a court-ordered desegregation in 1963.)80

For the fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress, and the nation, seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could birth the multiracial democracy that Black Americans envisioned, even if our founding fathers had not. But it would not last. “Tyranny is a central theme of American history,” the historian David Brion Davis writes in his 2006 book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, and “racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.”

In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull the remaining federal troops from the South.

Many white Americans saw Black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of Black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot, and lynched. We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy overseas while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens.

For the most part, Black Americans fought back alone, never getting a majority of white Americans to join and support their freedom struggles. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded Black people and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans.

It is truly an American irony that some Asian Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States in large numbers because of the Black civil rights struggle, have sued universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

December 1662 Virginia’s House of Burgesses passes a new law holding that “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” This doctrine, known as partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is brought forth follows the belly”), is a departure from English tradition, in which a child’s status followed that of the father. The law incentivizes the rape of enslaved Black women by their white enslavers.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the act’s interracial marriage ban in its celebrated Loving v. Virginia decision, but it left intact the racial-classification system itself.

from? As the justices unanimously found in their Loving decision, the 1924 Racial Integrity Act originated as “an incident to slavery” and its racial classifications served as nothing more than “measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.”

Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia’s state registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946, was a doctor with deep ties to both eugenicists and white supremacists.

enslaved people and Native Americans joined forces in the Natchez rebellion, which killed more than two hundred French settlers in Louisiana.

“Sugar, we are told, followed the Koran,” wrote the late anthropologist Sidney Mintz.

And thus slavery

Spain and Portugal had already begun to put enslaved Africans to work growing sugarcane on the Atlantic islands off the coast of North Africa, and the potential for an industry based on forced labor, fertile land, and a dawning era of global trade had reached an inflection point.

England first established trading posts for acquiring gold and ivory along a span of five thousand coastal Atlantic miles from present-day Morocco to South Africa, by 1672, King Charles II had conferred a monopoly on the Royal African Company specifically for the slave trade.7 The company used military personnel, government agents, and private investment capital garnered by selling stock to merchants to build the single most successful transatlantic slave-trading institution in history.

Malachy Postlethwayt, a London merchant, member of the Royal African Company, and author of The African Trade: The Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America,

in 1745. The more “Negroes imported,” he wrote, the more British goods were made and exported for trade. “The Negro-trade,” he emphasized, was the foundation of “an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.”9

The increasing supply from sugar plantations lowered the cost and made cheap sugar “the single most important addition to the British working-class diet during the nineteenth century,” according to Sidney Mintz.

In Liverpool, the Martins Bank Building, opened in 1932, and the former home of Barclays, memorialized the role of banks in financing the trade with a relief sculpture of two African boys fettered about the neck and ankles and holding bags of money.

The slave trade was complex and evolved out of existing networks of exchange indigenous to Africa. Before European slavers arrived, African chiefs and merchants were already trading among themselves,

Off the coast of Bonny Point, in present-day Nigeria, a young woman was grabbed by two men, who “secured her hands behind her back, beat her, and ill-used her, on account of the resistance she made,” according to testimony given by John Douglas, a slave trader.18 Traders routinely tore families asunder as they captured and stole people away from mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. Even some African traders ended up in fetters because of the treachery of it all. One measure of the horrors of kidnapping captives is evidenced by the British Parliament outlawing it in 1750.19

On the British vessel African in 1753, William Cooney raped a pregnant woman; she was listed in the log as “number 83,” following a common practice for a kind of deadnaming of captives. He took her “into the room and lay with her brute like in view of the whole quarter deck.”27 In these moments, slave traders were conditioning Africans for plantation slavery. But the captives were also forming a new identity, a diasporic Blackness, forged out of their collective fate, as they found strength in one another with every miserable day that passed.

A 1731 insurrection involved 140 Africans; they killed most of the crew and escaped with the ship.28

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.