The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

But what is left out of this story is that this Second Reconstruction was needed because the First Reconstruction, after the Civil War ended in 1865, failed to bring into being and sustain an equitable nation—an effort undermined by the propaganda of racial progress. What is left out of the story of our time is that a Third Reconstruction is needed because the Second Reconstruction failed to actualize King’s dream, again undermined by the racial-progress propaganda.

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University. “It is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress,” he said.56 But he also showed why decades of racial progress rhetoric had been shortsighted. Progress has primarily come for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Black people “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening,” Johnson pointed out. “Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same,” he noted. “Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.”

Malcolm X had stood before a meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) at a Methodist church in Cleveland. “How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours?” he asked, speaking of the Civil Rights Act, which was making its way through Congress at the time. “You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress.”

As 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 are 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.”17

According to a 2020 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950, an average of three every two weeks for eight and a half decades.52 (Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.53)

Brown v. Board of Education did not end segregated and unequal schools; it just ended segregation under the law. It took court orders and, at times, federal troops to produce any real integration. Nevertheless, more than six decades after the nation’s highest court proclaimed school segregation unconstitutional, Black children remain as segregated from white kids as they were in the early 1970s.59 There has never been a point in American history when even half of the Black children in this country have attended a majority-white school.

The inclination to bandage over and move on is a definitive American feature when it comes to anti-Black racism and its social and material effects. The 2019 Yale University study describes this phenomenon this way: “A firm belief in our nation’s commitment to racial egalitarianism is part of the collective consciousness of the United States of America…. We have a strong and persistent belief that our national disgrace of racial oppression has been overcome, albeit through struggle, and that racial equality has largely been achieved.”

According to a study published in September 2020 by the economists Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike Steins in the Journal of Political Economy, Black median household income in 1950 was about half that of white Americans, and today it remains so. More critical, the racial wealth gap is in relative terms about the same as it was in the 1950s as well. The typical Black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households. “No progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing income and wealth inequalities between Black and white households,” according to the study.