Correcting history Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of ‘1619 Project,’ says children deserve better than textbook bans
When it comes to racial healing in America, Nikole HannahJones isn’t hopeful, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to educate Americans about our country’s history of racism.
The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist at the New York Times Magazine and creator of the “The 1619 Project,” which commemorates the 400th anniversary of African slaves arriving in America, expected backlash when the project published in the magazine in 2019. It traces the nation’s beginning to the year enslaved African people were first brought to America — instead of 1776.
But she didn’t expect to become a lightning rod for political agendas, considering that many of her harshest critics have yet to even read her work.
“I’m not a hopeful person when it comes to the issue of race,” Hannah-Jones said, “but I certainly have taken to heart all of the people who have embraced this work and wanted to learn … and I’ve realized how little they actually have known about their country.
“I do believe that there’s a segment of Americans who don’t care and will never care — but I don’t think that’s most Americans.”
In the past year, Hannah-Jones ended a tenure fight with her alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, by joining Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C. She created the 1619 Freedom School, a free afterschool literacy program, in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. And she’s had two bestsellers — “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” and “The 1619 Project: Born on the Water,” a children’s picture book with co-writer Renée Watson and illustrator Nikkolas Smith, a Houston native.
The Pulitzer Center also has created a 1619 Project curriculum for students and educators.
In an exclusive interview with the Houston Chronicle, HannahJones talked about impact and controversy of “The 1619 Project” and what she hopes readers will take away.
Q: Your work has been applauded and praised, but also vilified. How do you deal with that?
A: It really depends on the day. I didn’t expect that I would become a symbol of something or that anyone would care about anything other than the work. It hasn’t been easy to see the type of personal attacks, but at the same time, people show me a lot of love. It’s been a lot, and sometimes, I don’t quite know how to process it.
Q: Do you think “The 1619 Project” has had an impact on how race and inequality are covered in the media?
A: I think my work shows that you can treat racial inequality as an investigative beat. That it is a serious subject worthy of serious journalistic inquiry and rigor. I hope that future generations will see in my work a model for how to do investigative journalism that exposes the way that racial inequality is maintained. Many of us, of my generation, were taught that or told that wanting to write about race was going to pigeonhole you. That if you wanted to be able to reach the height of your profession, you had to do work other than that. And I think that my work, along with the work of many other respected journalists, has disproved that.
Q: As you travel the country to talk about the book, what are people saying?
A: Among Black people who come to my talk, there’s often been a really emotional experience. A lot of Black Americans, like me, have felt really erased from the American story. When you are erased, you often take that as being less than. So I think I’ve heard from so many people who didn’t believe the history as it was told but didn’t have any facts otherwise.
Q: What have you learned through this?
A: I feel like I’ve learned so much, and I have so much knowledge and understanding and really just a great sense of pride about everything, not just that our ancestors have endured, but that our ancestors were always contributors to the American story. I’ve gotten similar reactions from people who aren’t Black who said, “I just had no idea about the history of my country. And I can’t see my country the same.” It’s been a deeply gratifying experience.
Q: Do you think “The 1619 Project” will have far-reaching implications on how the history of this country is told to the next generations?
A: I don’t know. It’s hard to talk about what impact you think your own work is going to have, but I hope so. The project is based upon decades of scholarship, much of it by Black historians. So what I hope it does more than anything is lift up the work of those without whom this work would not exist.
Q: What’s next?
A: I’m working on “The 1619 Project” basically all the time. We’ll be putting out at least two more books, one being a graphic novel. I’m filming the “1619” documentary right now, and then we’ll be doing other TV and film projects. Then, of course, I’m founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University. (The center, co-founded by bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, will train and support aspiring journalists.)
Q: Are you hopeful that we are moving toward racial healing?
A: I just think most Americans have been taught a very poor understanding of their country. But with that said, you’re calling from Texas, where “The 1619 Project” has been prohibited by law from being taught to children. There’s been an intensive backlash to this work and other anti-racist texts. Texas is also passing anti-voter laws. They’re also passing laws against women’s reproductive rights. I think we are in a very dangerous period in our country. White backlash is always the response to racial progress. And we had the racial reckoning of last year, which “The 1619 Project” was certainly a text of that reckoning. Now we’re seeing a very organized backlash against it. It’s hard to feel hope in this moment.
Q: What would you like Texans to know know about your work?
A: I just hope that they will come to the project with an open mind, that they will read it and decide for themselves, and not let politicians or anyone else determine how they think about the project. I certainly hope that folks will organize and push back because, whether you love the project or hate the project, we should all, as Americans, be opposed to the state trying to censor speech that it doesn’t like. We should all be opposed to the state trying to prohibit the teaching of texts because politicians don’t like what’s in those texts.
I hope that readers will not just accept that the state can decide that certain texts can’t be taught to children. Our children deserve better. Schools should not teach students what to think but how to think.