46 11.14.21
Jan. 28, 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who
has been a staff writer at The New York
Times Magazine since 2015, came to one
of our weekly ideas meetings with a very
big idea. My notes from the meeting
simply say, ‘‘NIKOLE: special issue on
the 400th anniversary of African slaves
coming to U.S.,’’ a milestone that was
approaching that August. This wasn’t the
fi rst time Nikole had brought up 1619.
As an investigative journalist who often
focuses on racial inequalities in educa-
tion, Nikole has frequently turned to his-
tory to explain the present. Sometimes,
reading a draft of one of her articles, I’d
ask if she might include even more his-
tory, to which she would remark that
if I gave her more space, she would be happy to take it all the way back to
- This was a running joke, but it was also a refl ection of how Nikole had
been cultivating the idea for what became the 1619 Project for many years.
Following that January meeting, she led an editorial process that over the
next six months developed the idea into a special issue of the magazine, a
special section of the newspaper and a multiepisode podcast series. Next
week we are publishing a book that expands on the magazine issue and
represents the fullest expression of her idea to date.
This book, which is called ‘‘The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,’’ arrives
amid a prolonged debate over the version of the project we published two
years ago. That project made a bold claim, which remains the central idea of
the book: that the moment in August 1619 when the fi rst enslaved Africans
arrived in the English colonies that would become the United States could,
in a sense, be considered the country’s origin.
The reasoning behind this is simple: Enslavement is not marginal to the
history of the United States; it is inextricable. So many of our traditions and
institutions were shaped by slavery, and so many of our persistent racial
inequalities stem from its enduring legacy. Identifying the start of such a vast
and complex system is a somewhat symbolic act. It was not until the late
1600s that slavery became codifi ed with new laws in various colonies that
fi rmly established the institution’s racial basis and dehumanizing structure.
But 1619 marks the earliest beginnings of what would become this system.
(It also could be said to mark the earliest beginnings of what would become
American democracy: In July of that year, just weeks before the White Lion
arrived in Point Comfort with its human cargo, the Virginia General Assembly
was called to order, the fi rst elected legislative body in English America.)
But the argument for 1619 as our origin point goes beyond the centrality
of slavery; 1619 was also the year that a heroic and generative process com-
menced, one by which enslaved Africans and their free descendants would
profoundly alter the direction and character of the country, having an impact
on everything from politics to popular culture. ‘‘Around us the history of the
land has centered for thrice a hundred years,’’ W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903,
and it is diffi cult to argue against extending his point through the century
to follow, one that featured a Black civil rights struggle that transformed
American democracy and the birth of numerous Black art forms that have
profoundly infl uenced global culture. The 1619 Project made the provocative
case that the start of the African presence in the English North American
colonies could be considered the moment of inception of the United States of
America. This argument was supported by 10 works of nonfi ction — an open-
ing essay by Nikole, followed by works from the journalists Jamelle Bouie,
Jeneen Interlandi, Trymaine Lee, Wesley Morris and Linda Villarosa and the
scholars Matthew Desmond, Kevin M. Kruse, Khalil Gibran Muhammad and
Bryan Stevenson, all focused on the enduring impacts of slavery and racism
and the contributions of Black Americans to our society.
Initially, the magazine issue was greeted with an enthusiastic response
unlike any we had seen before. The weekend it was available in print, Aug.
18 and 19, readers all over the country complained of having to visit multiple
newsstands before they could fi nd a copy. A week later, when The Times
made tens of thousands of copies available for sale online, they sold out in
hours. Copies of the issue began to appear on eBay at ridiculous markups.
Portions of Nikole’s opening essay from the project, which would go on to
win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, were cited in the halls of Congress;
candidates in what was then a large fi eld of potential Democratic nominees for
president referred to it on the stump and the debate stage; 1619 Project book
clubs seemed to materialize overnight. All of this happened in the fi rst month.
Substantive criticisms of the project began a few months later. Five his-
torians, led by the Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, sent a letter that asked
The Times to issue ‘‘prominent corrections’’ for what they claimed were
the project’s ‘‘errors and distortions.’’ We took this letter very seriously. The
criticism focused mostly on Nikole’s introductory essay and within that essay
zeroed in on her argument about the role of slavery in the American Rev-
olution: ‘‘Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,’’ Nikole wrote,
‘‘is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare
their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the
institution of slavery.’’
Though we recognized that the role of slavery is a matter of ongoing
debate among historians of the revolution, we did not agree that this line
or the other passages in question required ‘‘prominent corrections,’’ as I
explained in a letter of response. Ultimately, however, we issued a clarifi -
cation, accompanied by a lengthy editors’ note: By saying that protecting
slavery was ‘‘one of the primary reasons,’’ Nikole did not mean to imply
that it was a primary reason for every one of the colonists, who were, after
all, a geographically and culturally diverse lot with varying interests; rather,
she meant that one of the primary reasons driving some of them, particu-larly those from the Southern colonies, was the protection of slavery from
British meddling. We clarifi ed this by adding ‘‘some of’’ to Nikole’s original
sentence so that it read: ‘‘Conveniently left out of our founding mythology
is 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.’’
We published the letter from the fi ve historians, along with my response,
a few days before Christmas. Dozens of media outlets covered the exchange,
and the coverage set certain corners of social media ablaze — which fueled
more stories, which led others to weigh in. The editor of The American
Historical Review, the journal of the American Historical Association, the
nation’s oldest professional association of historians, noted in an editor’s
letter that the controversy was ‘‘all anyone asked me about at the A.H.A.’s
annual meeting during the fi rst week of January.’’ The debate was still raging
two months later, when everyone’s world changed abruptly.Almost immediately, present and past converged: 2020 seemed to be off er-
ing a demonstration of the 1619 Project’s themes. The racial disparities inAs our country has moved
forward from its imperfect
beginnings, our history has
transformed behind us.
On