The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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.

Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of Black people in the name of economic efficiency. The historian Michael Tadman found that Louisiana sugar parishes had a pattern of “deaths greatly exceed[ing] births.”51

In 2013, public-health researchers at Johns Hopkins University used the U.S. Census and InfoUSA food-store data to analyze supermarket availability by census tract. As poverty increased, the number of supermarkets decreased, but the prevalence of junk-food-stocked convenience stores increased. And when poverty was held constant, the researchers found, Black communities still had the “fewest supermarkets.”58

In 1669, the Carolina colony granted every free white man “absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves.” Within decades, Carolina law drastically bolstered white authority, mandating that all white people ought to be responsible for policing all Black people’s activities. Any white person who failed to properly monitor suspicious Black activity would be fined forty shillings.11 This notion—that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them—ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States.

August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved man in Virginia who believed that slavery violated God’s law and that God had selected him to lead his people to freedom, unleashed a bloody rebellion.55 Over

While Turner was still free, however, roving gangs of white men attacked Black people in Southampton and nearby counties, killing as many as two hundred to ensure that Black rebels would not dare to attempt another revolt.

In Louisiana, for example, it was illegal for free people of color to “conceive themselves equal to the whites.” As the law explicitly stated, Black people should “yield” to white people “on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect.” If legally free Black people failed to submit to white authority, they were subject to imprisonment.63

massive investments in punitive control over Black people, rather than massive investments that might have repaired the harm caused by centuries of racial oppression. For more than four decades, our nation has declared wars on drugs and crime, invested billions of dollars in highly militarized police forces, and embarked on a race to incarcerate in Black communities, while slashing funding from education, drug treatment, public housing, and welfare.93 The result has been disastrous. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world—the number of people behind bars has quintupled in the past four decades—while the Black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968.94

George Washington held financial interests in these westerly lands that could not be exploited while the Proclamation of 1763 prevented freewheeling land sales.13 As Calloway succinctly put it in The Indian World of George Washington: “The Revolution was not only a war for independence and a new political order; it was also a war for the North American continent.”14

By 1680, the Cofitachequi chiefdom had disappeared. Disease, political instability, and slaving had ravaged Mississippian chiefdoms in the century and a half after Europeans arrived and led to a widespread societal collapse that left behind what the anthropologist Robbie Ethridge has termed a “shatter zone.”17

As they sought to survive in a maelstrom of change set in motion by modern European capitalism, colonialism, and racial slavery, Native Americans began actively raiding and seizing people from other tribes in order to establish strong trade relations with the English, to service debts, and to avoid being hunted themselves. As the historian Alan Gallay has documented, at least thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous Southerners were enslaved by Anglo colonists

These shared circumstances of enslavement led to the merger of families, cultures, and fates. Indigenous American people intermarried with Africans and their American-born descendants.20 Corn-based and leafy green–intensive Indigenous diets fused with African American cooking that relied on sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, and pork to form a fundamental part of Southern regional culinary culture.

Enslaved Black people used local plants as herbal medicines in accordance with Indigenous knowledge, and both groups developed a rich and perhaps mutually informed folklore centering on trickster rabbit stories.

“comprehensive cultural change,” converting a communal lifestyle rooted in sustainable farming and hunting into an individualistic lifestyle punctuated by private property and male authority.

Because the federal civilization policy was conceived, developed, and enforced by enslavers who felt their way of life was advanced and ideal, it included the tacit expectation that the most progressive among Native Americans, those who would lead their people into the future, should also enslave Black people. Although this was not explicitly written into the plan, 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.

Among the Indigenous nations, Cherokees enslaved the largest number of people, but Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws also developed entrenched systems of Black enslavement tethered to racial prejudice.

In the words of one Georgia militiaman who was also present: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”51

Native expulsion was, he writes, “the war the slaveholders won.”59

Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug had cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a healthcare conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system, and capitalist rules.”1 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.

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.

To this day, the fifteen states where slavery remained legal as of 1861 still hold the power to block a constitutional amendment supported by the other thirty-five.12 So if Washington often feels broken, that’s because it was built that way.

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 Fifth Amendment’s language protecting private property resurfaced in the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified during Reconstruction, which established legal and civil rights for Black Americans by mandating “equal protection of the laws” and prohibiting states from denying people “life, liberty, or property, without due process.” It didn’t take long for corporate attorneys to realize that the Fourteenth Amendment could help strengthen business interests too. This was affirmed in 1886 by Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who plainly stated before oral arguments for Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. that the Supreme Court believed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations as well as to people.23 The Fourteenth Amendment became the most cited amendment in Supreme Court cases, leaving a profound impact on private law.

A 1912 study found that of the 604 Fourteenth Amendment cases decided by the Supreme Court, more than half involved corporations and largely protected their power, including by striking down attempts to end child labor and establish a minimum wage. Less than 5 percent of those cases concerned the rights of African Americans, who lost nearly all of the cases they brought.

The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap—just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars)—to white settlers.30 Naturally, the first to cash in were the land speculators. Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price. Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush, and leveled the earth for planting. “Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered.31 A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop as American money exerted its will on the earth, bringing floods and erosion, erasing natural habitats, and otherwise spoiling the environment for profit.

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. Almost all of the major financial institutions responsible for that downturn, however, did survive.52

The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave-labor camps predates industrialism. Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation.

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. That decision, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, “drove such a wedge between white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”

No one has ever accused Donald Trump of being subtle, but even for him, this was blatant. Atlanta is 51 percent Black; Detroit, 78 percent. Philadelphia is 42 percent Black, and Milwaukee has a Black population of just under 39 percent. So-called illegal votes were, in actuality, just Black votes. This wasn’t about election integrity; it was about casting Black voters as politically illegitimate. As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in its lawsuit representing a group of Michigan voters against the Trump campaign, “Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history.”

Calhoun built an entire theory of government. Seeing the threat democracy posed to slavery, he set out to limit democracy. 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.

In New York, for example, a new 1821 state constitution imposed a hefty $250 property qualification on Black voters while it eliminated property requirements for white voters.20 Pennsylvania disenfranchised Black men altogether in 1838 by a change to its constitution.

The new Fourteenth Amendment put birthright on secure footing—insulating it from the changing winds of politics and the shifting minds of subsequent sessions of Congress. In June 1866, the proposed amendment was sent on to the states for ratification. Most of the former Confederate states refused to ratify. Congress then passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which mandated the establishment of new governments in the South, with Black men now eligible to vote and hold office, and required ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a condition of readmission into the Union. In just over two years, in July 1868, the requisite twenty-eight states had approved the amendment, and it was ratified. Notably, however, three of the four slaveholding border states that had remained in the Union—Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky—did not ratify the amendment until years later, in 1901, 1959, and 1976, respectively. Ambivalence about Black citizenship persisted.46

January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, and Americans gather all over the country to hear it read aloud. One notable gathering is at Camp Saxton, a garrison of Union troops established on a former plantation near Port Royal, South Carolina, two years earlier. Camp Saxton is home to one of the first Black military brigades, the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment, under the command of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a well-known white abolitionist and Unitarian minister. The camp also draws various abolitionists and missionaries to educate and minister to the formerly enslaved people, including Charlotte Forten, a Black abolitionist from Philadelphia, and Seth Rogers, a white doctor and friend of Colonel Higginson’s from Boston who was the regiment’s surgeon.

Emily Dickinson’s friend

in the South, which had large enslaved populations, everyone understood that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” was to suppress uprisings of the enslaved.

the research of Anthony Greenwald, a University of Washington psychologist, reveals how in computer simulations, Black people are more likely to be shot than white people who dress and act similarly.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth: this country contains 4 percent of the planet’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners. This is a relatively recent development. In the early 1970s, our prisons and jails held fewer than 350,000 people; since then, that number has increased to about 2.3 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole.

because of mandatory sentencing and three-strikes laws, I have found myself representing people sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana.

The Thirteenth Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that. It made an exception for those convicted of crimes: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis added).

The Freedmen’s Bureau, always meant to be temporary, was dismantled in 1872. More than sixty thousand Black people had deposited more than $3 million into the savings bank, but its all-white trustees used that money to begin issuing speculative loans to white investors and corporations. When the bank failed in 1874, Black depositors lost much of their savings.

Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, to control for the assumption that Black people have less lung capacity than white people. In her 2014 book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, Lundy Braun, a Brown University professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and Africana studies, as well as a professor of medical science at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, notes that the “race correction” is conventional practice, treated as fact in textbooks and still taught in many medical schools.31

prophetic witness to the moral outrage of racism in America. It was the rhetoric of dissent, according to Bercovitch. David Walker, a nineteenth-century anti-slavery advocate and a member of the A.M.E. Church, embraced this approach in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, excoriating white Christians for their role in the slave trade: “They cram us into their vessel holds in chains and hand-cuffs—men, women and children all together!! O! save us, we pray thee, thou God of Heaven and of earth, from the devouring hands of the white Christians!!!”8

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, enslaved people, often motivated by religious fervor, regularly joined uprisings led by Black spiritual leaders. Denmark Vesey, a free carpenter and a member of Charleston’s A.M.E. church, made plans for a rebellion in the city in 1822. After his capture and execution, local white residents burned the church—the same congregation Dylann Roof attacked in 2015—to the ground.

while the picture is particularly bad for people of color, they are hardly the only ones suffering from the healthcare system’s failings. In fact, America has the lowest life expectancy, the highest incidence of chronic disease, and the highest rate of avoidable hospitalizations and avoidable deaths when compared to other high-income countries, despite spending more money on healthcare by far.

During the 1930s, Southern congressmen headed many of the key committees in Congress. They used this power to ensure that New Deal measures did not threaten the nation’s racial stratification. For example, as the Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson and others have documented, it was largely at the behest of Southern Democrats that farm and domestic workers—who made up more than half the nation’s workforce at the time, and an even higher percentage of the Black workforce—were excluded from New Deal policies, including the Social Security Act; the Wagner Act, which ensured the right of workers to collective bargaining; and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a minimum wage and established the eight-hour workday.

While interstates were regularly used to destroy Black neighborhoods, they were also used to keep Black and white neighborhoods apart. Today, major roads and highways serve as stark dividing lines between Black and white sections in cities like Buffalo, Hartford, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis.

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.36 During his senatorial bid against Stephen Douglas in 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 During his presidency, Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery while also supporting colonization schemes as late as 1862.38 Lincoln’s positions on slavery, colonization, and emancipation shifted with the winds of political and military expediency stirred by the Civil War. 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.

Nearly 500,000 Black people in border states; approximately 300,000 Black people in Union-occupied Confederate areas, including the entire state of Tennessee and portions of Virginia and Louisiana; and more than 3,000,000 people in Confederate territories remained enslaved.

in the history of Liberty,” Bicknell wrote.40 Some people who witnessed the construction of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator realized that racial-progress mythology was being used to cleanse white people of their guilt and responsibility. “The negro has saved himself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed around this time, “and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you.”

Jim Crow segregation in the United States had been a topic of political discourse in the USSR since the late 1920s, and Black Americans’ experiences of racist policies and violence had been featured in the Soviet press to argue for the superiority of communism over capitalism and to charge the United States with hypocrisy for claiming to be the exemplar of global freedom.

The U.S. government tried to reconcile the nation’s new image as a global beacon of morality and democracy with worldwide press coverage of its pervasive racism.48 In 1947, the Truman administration issued To Secure These Rights: The Report of the 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. But that same year, the NAACP offered the ninety-four-page An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. And in 1951, the Civil Rights Congress delivered a petition, We Charge Genocide, to a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Paris.