The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“The White Lion” poem by Claudia Rankine

Nikole Hannah-Jones shares how learning about the White Lion’s landing in 1619 changed the way she saw the role of Black people in history and present-day America. As a student, she loved history, but Black people and their role in received history was inconsequential at best, invisible at worst. We appeared only where unavoidable: slavery was mentioned briefly […] and then Black people disappeared again for a full century until magically reappearing as Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech about a dream (xvii-xviii).

Hannah-Jones questioned why Black people, who contributed so much to the nation’s founding, did not feature in her education. This exclusion of Black people shows in American people’s ignorance of the history of slavery and has had lasting cultural implications. Years after learning about the arrival of enslaved people on American soil in 1619, Hannah-Jones suggested the 1619 Project, questioning, “how […] looking at contemporary American life through this lens [would] help us better appreciate the contributions of Black Americans—not only to our culture but also democracy itself” (xxiii).

The backlash to The 1619 Project spread far and wide. A few historians disagreed with the framework of the text.