Nikole Hannah-Jones Joins Ryan to Discuss 1619 Project, Legacy of Slavery at UVA

“We know those words by heart, but we also know that when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, he owned 130 human beings, including his own family members,” she said. “I want to get at the heart of what it means to be a country founded on both slavery and the ideal of freedom, while absolutely denying one-fifth of the population those rights, and how that corrupts everything that comes afterward.”

Hannah-Jones, a 2017 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” leads the Times’ 1619 Project, which reexamines U.S. history starting in 1619, when a ship arrived in Virginia carrying more than 20 Africans who would be enslaved.

Launched last year, the project includes numerous essays tracing how the legacy of slavery influences contemporary life, from the growth of democracy and capitalism to the current state of health care in America; as well as original compositions by contemporary black writers and a visual history of slavery created in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Hannah-Jones is also working on a book based on the project.

On Monday, she and Ryan discussed the project (and how it relates to UVA’s own history) in a talk sponsored by UVA’s Democracy Initiative, its Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, Memory Project and the UVA Equity Center. Later Monday, Hannah-Jones joined UVA alumnus and fellow New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie for a discussion at The Haven in downtown Charlottesville.

“The 1619 Project has clearly touched a nerve, taking a debate often reserved for scholars in the academy out of the academy and bringing it into the wider world, taking a debate that some find liberating, some find challenging, and placing it center stage, imploring all of us, every single one of us, to engage,” Democracy Initiative co-director Melody Barnes said as she introduced Hannah-Jones.

“That kind of engagement is central to our work at the Democracy Initiative and to what a cross-section of UVA students told us. Those students shared they want more places to have meaningful discussion about challenging issues and hear points of view that differ from their own.”

Hannah-Jones told Ryan that she could trace the 1619 Project’s origins back to her high school years, when she first heard the 1619 date after taking a black studies course and learning that enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619 before the Mayflower arrived in 1620.

“I remember feeling a jolt when I saw that date, because I never knew we were in this country for that long,” she said. “Even as a 16-year-old, I understood that there was power in erasure, and that erasure was intentional.”

As the 400^th anniversary of that arrival approached, Jones – by then a writer at New York Times Magazine – pitched an idea to her editors: Let’s put out a magazine and a project devoted to tracing the legacy of that moment in American life.

“I didn’t want it to be just a commemoration, but an acknowledgement of what slavery wrought, and the centrality of slavery, not just looking at history, but at the ongoing, everyday legacy that we all live with,” Hannah-Jones said.

The reaction was immediate and strong. Hannah-Jones talked about how she felt when she saw people lining up to buy the magazine – which sold out the day it became available and then sold out again – and discussed objections raised by a group of historians, including a letter from Princeton historian Sean Wilentz arguing that, for example, Hannah-Jones falsely cited protecting the institution of slavery as a key motivation for independence from Britain.

Asked about that debate, Hannah-Jones noted that she consulted with a range of scholars during the project and attributed some of the objections to unwillingness to leave behind a rosier narrative of the country’s founding.

“There is a big battle amongst historians of the American Revolution right now, and some are still protecting, across ideology, the political story of our founding,” she said. “They want to believe that we had some problems at the beginning, but we are a good country and all of this will work out.”

That view, she said, is fundamentally different from her own view of the country and its progress.

“This is not ancient history for me. I am 43 and I am part of the first generation of black people in the history of the U.S. born into the country with the full rights of citizenship,” she said, noting that her father was born in a shack because African Americans were not allowed to give birth in the local hospital.

“To me, progress is a balm that eases the conscience of those who are the beneficiaries of the system,” she said. “Progress, to me, is insulting when what we should have at this point is equality. That is all I demand, and I am not going to accept anything less.”

The second half of the discussion, as well as an audience Q&A session, largely focused on how issues raised in the 1619 Project have played out at universities, especially at UVA.

Looking out at the Rotunda, and the Lawn beyond, Hannah-Jones said that no visitor should be able to see that landscape without acknowledging how it was built.

“A university like this has to deal with it. You have to see the dirt of it as well; you cannot just see the glory,” she said.

The 1619 Project, she said, was meant to spur such action.

“I wanted people to be deeply unsettled, and to answer that question of ‘Why can’t you get over it?’” she said. “I wanted to provide the documentation that we can’t get over it because this country has not gotten over it.”

Several African American students and community members in the audience asked Hannah-Jones what they could do to keep fighting for equality when they felt their efforts were going unheeded.

Commending them for their work, Hannah-Jones offered a piece of advice that had helped her over the years.

“I believe in making oneself undeniable,” she said. “You are here because you belong here. The only thing you can control is your own excellence. Make yourself undeniable.”