The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

1619 was the year that the White Lion anchored in Virginia, leading to the first sale of enslaved people in North America. 1619 therefore represents the origin story that Hannah-Jones seeks to tell about America: one about the Black Americans excluded from traditional national myths, despite being “democracy’s defenders and perfecters” (452). This exclusion does more than erase Black Americans from a country they helped build; it also erases the lasting implications of the institution of slavery.

Establishing 1619 as America’s origin point provides room for the contributors of The 1619 Project to explore the many ways slavery shaped the country. Where focusing on 1776 implies tacit acceptance of America’s creation myth—that the country was founded, first and foremost, on liberty and equality—returning to 1619 forces readers to confront the fact that the country was founded at least as much on slavery:

The sin became the nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. […] American democracy had been created on the back of unfree Black labor. Blackness came to define whiteness—and whiteness defined American democracy prior to the Civil War (21).

Hannah-Jones knew “the absence of the 1619 mainstream history was intentional” (xx). This history was not taught because it would require Americans to face what they had so conveniently buried under the myth of white supremacy and the institution of slavery—that Black Americans were purposefully used to create a nation that they would never be able to reap the benefits of.