In late August 1619, the first enslaved Africans arrived in the Virginia colony. This paper-wide editorial effort aims to show how slavery has shaped the American experience until today.
The New York Times Magazine has launched an extraordinary editorial project to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the British colony of Virginia. This project is wide-reaching and collaborative, unflinching, and insightful. Best of all, 1619-related coverage is planned throughout the entire New York Times platform.
The 1619 Project serves as a dramatic and necessary corrective to the fundamental lie of the American origin story. It begins with an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the driving force behind the project, and one of the most extraordinary writers this country has produced.
What she has come to do is twofold. First, establish that the principles of liberty the founding fathers are famous for were false when written. And next, that the very people upon whose backs this country’s wealth was created have spent centuries working to make the country live up to them.
“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves—black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.
Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.”
The scope of the project is astonishing. There are original literary works that help to illuminate the past from 16 writers including Eve Ewing, Clint Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Barry Jenkins. Through deft reporting and smart framing, contributing writers also make plain how the racist violence that informed slavery lives on today, in the way Americans live and die, teach and heal, lead, govern, eat, and even drive: How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam; How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today; The Barbaric History of Sugar in America; Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery, are just some of the headlines that await you.
If you have some time, I strongly recommend watching the video of the kick-off conference—even the first 20 minutes will be enough to set you right. It begins, as I now realize all things should, with poetry. But it also reveals the deep connection between the magazine’s staffers and contributors, at a poignant and celebratory moment. Think what you will about the media, this kind of project changes anyone who takes it on.
And this was a particularly particular group effort.
Two journalists were moved to tears during their remarks, tears that I understood to be an emotional acknowledgment of the enormous responsibility they took on by attempting to set a 400-year record straight; to connect dots that others have sought to erase, and to honor the legacies of elders some of whose names we may never know, in their own attempts to make the lies of America true.
They got the job done.
