The 1619 Project Quotes

“This is our national truth: America would not be America without the wealth from Black labor, without Black striving, Black ingenuity, Black resistance.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“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.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“They had no things. But they had their minds.
The old ways, the harvest songs, the just-right mix of herbs etched in their memories.

They had their bodies. Histories and bloodlines and drums pulsing in their veins.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“These many people
became one people,
a new people.”
― Renée Watson, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water