What the landmark ‘1619 Project’ taught Nikole Hannah-Jones

Even when the award-winning “1619 Project” was just the seed of an idea, Nikole Hannah-Jones knew the immensity of her endeavor.

The ambitious set of essays first published by The New York Times in August 2019 centered the enslavement of Africans in the founding of America and aimed to unsettle long-held narratives that downplay the role of slavery in the development of the nation. The project beckons readers to consider 1619 as a founding date, and the practice of slavery as the country’s true foundation. “The 1619 Project” also reshaped long-held narratives about Black Americans by telling a fresh and factual 400-year story of a people.

“You don’t make those arguments and not expect that there’s going to be pushback,” Hannah-Jones told Poynter.

The pushback was fierce. Hannah-Jones was ushered into a harsh spotlight. A bill was introduced to strip funds from school districts that taught the project. Former President Donald Trump created the 1776 Commission.

For Hannah-Jones, who has spent her career connecting the historical and modern-day dots about school segregation, housing segregation and criminal justice, it was just more proof of her resilience.

In this Tuesday, July 6, 2021, file photo, Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is interviewed at her home in the Brooklyn borough of New York as she announces that she will establish the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard to increase diversity in journalism. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

History, she said, “is shaping our society, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we know it or not.

“And so the absence of that history means there’s an absence of a real understanding,” she said.

The project went on to become a magazine, a book, a Hulu documentary series and a podcast. Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her essay.

Five years later, she has taken “1619” across the globe. She is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and is building a center for journalism and democracy at Howard University, a historically Black college, and creating a pipeline for the next generation of investigative journalists.

“This is why we got into journalism,” Hannah-Jones said. “We believe that people need information, and that people can be transformed by information, and they can be.”

Hannah-Jones spoke with Poynter about what “The 1619 Project” (and its many iterations) taught her, what Ida B. Wells would say about the state of journalism today, and what stories she still wants to tick off her idea list.

This written interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can also hear some of her answers below.

TyLisa C. Johnson: When you look back and reflect on the early days of conceptualizing “The 1619 Project,” what sticks out to you now from that time?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: What sticks out to me the most is just the ambition of the project, and knowing, once I got the green light to do it, that I needed to deliver, and — I knew even back then — it was going to be a once in a lifetime sort of project, and that there was a lot riding on it. I was really obsessing over both how to get it right, but also all the different ways I could expand it, even from the first time I pitched it, and what else could it be? This was a project trying to tell a people’s 400-year story. And so I just was constantly thinking about: What could make it stronger? What different tentacles could this project have? And could we do it all in the short amount of time that we actually had to publish it?

Johnson: How much time did you actually have?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Well, I pitched it in February, and we published it in August, and the magazine closes a week before publication. So, for what we did that was a very short timeline.

Johnson: Did you suspect or have any inclination about the reception or the criticism that’s unfolded around the project?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Well, I had no idea how people would receive the project, whether anyone would read it, anyone would care. I was really worried, of course, that I’ve somehow been able to marshal all these resources for this massive project on the legacy of slavery and in our kind of frenzied ecosystem, it’s hard to keep attention on anything, and especially a project that had tens of thousands of words on slavery and its legacy.

So no, I didn’t have any expectations over how it would go into the world. And I actually think that’s important as to why the project has been so successful, because we were just focused on making the project that we felt needed to be made, and not trying to think, well, what’s going to drive traffic to it? Or, what do readers want? What can they actually deal with?

I certainly knew that there was going to be some conservative pushback against the project. And if there hadn’t been, the project would not have succeeded in my mind because we were trying to unsettle established narratives about American exceptionalism and established narratives that really downplay and embrace the centrality of slavery in the development of our country. And so, when we argue that maybe what would it mean to consider 1619, and the practice of slavery as our founding and not 1776, and the ideas of liberty, you don’t make those arguments and not expect that there’s going to be pushback. Because we were wanting people to feel uncomfortable and challenged.

So I certainly expected some. And when the project first published, of course, it was very successful; exceeded anything we could have imagined, even in the first few days and the coming months. And there was the normal kind of expected conservative pushback, and then that kind of went away, and then it came back. And that’s the backlash that we all talk about now, which is a handful of historians criticized the project, and I think that really emboldened the backlash that would come.

And no, we couldn’t have expected the president of the United States castigating the project. A bill being introduced by two powerful senators to strip federal funds from school districts that taught the project. Trump creating an entire commission, the 1776 Commission, in opposition to the project. State legislative bans. And ultimately that whole anti-critical race theory frenzy.

No, no, no one could have predicted that. I mean, that’s been awe-inspiring in that I don’t think a single work of journalism has ever faced that sort of backlash.

Johnson: What did creating “The 1619 Project” teach you? What do you feel like you walked away with or learned?

Hannah-Jones: I’ve been studying this history since I was 15 years old. I have an undergraduate degree in history and African American studies. I’ve written about race and studied this my entire adult life. And yet, I learned something in every single page of the project.

And so in the most kind of literal interpretation of that question, I learned new facts about our history, made new connections about how the legacy of slavery was shaping our society in every single iteration of the project, and that’s been such a gift, because in seeking to edify our country, I, of course, ultimately edified myself.

But if I think about that question in the broader sense, it just affirmed that you could never completely tell this story, that the history is so vast that you could study this for the rest of your life and only know an iota of what there is to know, and that if, in fact, someone who has studied this history her whole life can learn and make connections, the expectation that regular Americans would be able to have a baseline understanding of their country, I think, is not real.

And so what I learned from this is that so many Americans actually want a better understanding of their country, and we’re all kind of struggling with trying to understand the country when we’ve been taught a history of a country that has never existed.

And so what I’ve learned is you can actually create something that is challenging, that is difficult, that is discomfiting, and that there will be an appetite for that. That despite these book bans and these divisive concept laws and these efforts to say that we need to restrict access to this knowledge because it will teach people to hate their country, that actually, people who have a great love for their country want to learn this so that they can make their country better, and I wasn’t expecting that.

It’s been five years. I have not left the road in five years. I’ve traveled all over the world talking about this project, because it shows, really, the power. I mean, this is why we got into journalism. We believe that people need information, and that people can be transformed by information, and they can be. I certainly could not have imagined that when I when I first created the project, but that’s been amazing, and it taught me that I have a tremendous amount of resilience, which I already knew, but it’s certainly been affirmed by everything that’s happened to me personally and to the project and surrounding the project since it published.

I guess the last thing I’ll say is, being lucky enough to curate this work and to work with so many people for whom having just a tiny piece of the project has been so meaningful, and I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who have shed tears because they they felt seen in this project. They felt like, “My whole life I knew, I knew what they said about us wasn’t true, but I didn’t have the data to push back on it.”

That sense of empowerment, that sense of almost being able to release a shame that I think so many of us as Black people feel, no matter how much pride our families tried to instill in us, the sense of shame that we hadn’t maybe contributed that much, that our legacy begins with slavery, that I think after engaging with the project — whether it be in the magazine form, the book form, the podcast, the documentary series — that people feel seen and validated, and take away a tremendous respect for our people and how our struggle has built this country.

Johnson: You’re a history lover. We know this. We love this about you. Has your experience with “The 1619 Project” affected your view on how historical topics should be communicated or reported?

Hannah-Jones: I think what it’s done is affirmed what I’ve always believed. “The 1619 Project” is five years old, but my work from its earliest days has always delved into history. I’ve always believed that as journalists, we cannot just report on what is happening today, as if there’s not an entire history that built it, and that it’s our job when we’re trying to translate a policy or explain a community or explain a harm, it’s our job to understand what created it. What is the past that built this thing that we’re trying to explicate?

My work has always done that. My work on housing segregation, my work on school segregation, on criminal justice, I’m always going back and trying to help explain that history, because that history is shaping our society, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we know it or not. And so the absence of that history means there’s an absence of a real understanding.

And I think what working on this project has done — it’s just affirmed that. It’s affirmed that, again, not only is it important, which I already knew, but that people want that understanding, that people feel robbed once they realize there’s all this history that they could have been taught, or that they should have learned that would have helped them better grapple with the society we have, and that they hadn’t been taught it. And it just shows the power of that.

I often tell this really bad joke that my first love is history, but I didn’t become a historian because I actually wanted people to read what I write. And I know that’s a bad joke, but sort of true, right? Most people are not reading history every day, but it doesn’t mean they don’t want that information.

I have the best job in the world. I read books for a living. I read studies, I read research, I talk to really smart people, and then I can translate that for a common reader. I can export that knowledge to the masses. And I think that’s the beauty of what “The 1619 Project” did. It didn’t uncover new history, but it democratized it, and it not only democratized it, but it made it real to people in saying, “Oh, you want to understand why you’re sitting in traffic in Atlanta, and it doesn’t make any sense why they designed this highway system this way?” Actually, let me explain that to you, that history of race, segregation, of planning infrastructure, not based on how can it be the most efficient, but how can it be most efficient in hurting Black people, will help you understand this thing that you’re dealing with today. And that’s really the power of journalism, but the power of journalism that uses history as a tool.

MORE FROM POYNTER: Nikole Hannah-Jones, 1619, and the power of the conceptual scoop

Johnson: Are there historical events or themes that you want to explore further, either as a continuation of “1619” or in a new project?

Hannah-Jones: Yeah. Of course. Always, right? I think I’m like all good journalists, is my story list never gets shorter. You tick things off, but you’re always adding way more than you’re able to tick off.

I really am thinking so much about, of course, this current moment that we’re in, and the historical parallels. Particularly when it comes to civil rights law, when it comes to the issue of reparations, I have a lot more work I want to do in reparations, because, again, even how I’m thinking about it and understanding it has changed from five years ago, because the more you read, the more our contemporary landscape changes, then your own mind begins to change and expand.

I’m actually really interested in what parallels can be drawn through how this nation has treated Indigenous people, but particularly as a category. We have Bureau of Indian Affairs, we have certain rights, an entire code of law that is built around native sovereignty, so not built around Native Americans as a race but as a group that has treaties with the United States.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what would it mean to reenact the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, of course, is what the California Reparations Task Force is recommending. What would it mean to finally have our own unique ethnic group, acknowledged ethnicity for Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country? That’s kind of a natural iteration of the work of “The 1619 Project,” which very explicitly was not centered on like the global transatlantic slave trade, but was about what happened here in America. I think that’s the next logical thing.

And ultimately, in doing that work, trying to help us figure out when we have a Supreme Court that is making it impossible for us to maintain programs that explicitly grapple with race, what are the ways that we can get around that and ensure that we are still helping the people that these laws were originally made for.

Johnson: I know we’re over time. Do you have like one more minute? I have a bonus question about advocacy journalism today that I’m dying to ask you.

Hannah-Jones: OK, sure.

Johnson: OK, so a lot of conversations have been swirling about the validity and about the role of advocacy journalism today. I think about the documentarian who secretly recorded Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. I’m also thinking about like, say, The Kansas City Defender and these other scrappy news startups that feel like they’re walking in the footsteps of Black press and journalists like Ida B. Wells. I’m curious, from your perspective, what is the role of advocacy journalism today? Does it have a place? What would Ida B. Wells say about the state of our industry?

Hannah-Jones: Yeah, well, I’ve been very explicit and outspoken on this, in that I don’t feel journalism is, by definition, an objective profession or neutral profession. The reason I founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard is to say we have to take a stance on certain things. I often quote the motto of The Washington Post, which is, “Democracy dies in darkness.” That’s not a neutral stance. That’s saying that our role as journalists is to protect democracy, right? So I actually see all good journalism as activism.

Now, it’s not the same sort of activism as someone like Ida B. Wells, right? Ida B. Wells was literally an activist and a journalist. She was a suffragist, she was a civil rights activist and she was a journalist. So I think there’s certainly a place for that. There’s always been a place for that. That has never gone away, even as the mainstream press has tried to kind of purge that spirit out of journalism.

But I also think just mainstream press, that when you decide you want to be an investigative reporter, you’re not exposing wrongdoing just because you think it’s interesting. You are exposing wrongdoing because you want our systems to serve vulnerable people. You want justice. You want to work on, on behalf of good and what is right. So I think that that is our calling.

So there is a place for advocacy journalism. I tell my students all the time that I understand the urge that you want to go out and join a protest when something happens to your community, but our job as journalists — our activism — is we expose the thing that’s going to lead people to protest, right? We empower people to know how their communities are being harmed so that they can do something about it.

Our official founders were wrong on many, many, many things, but one thing that they understood, that Thomas Jefferson understood, is that a free people must be an informed people. And there’s a reason ours is the only profession that is in the Constitution. There’s a reason why the First Amendment to the Constitution protects a free press, because we play a unparalleled role in a democracy, in a free society, and that’s not something that I take lightly.

And I think far too often we are now taught that objectivity requires us to adhere to this notion of balance, even when we are reporting on a political system that has a tremendous imbalance. I say our obligation is not to balance or objectivity, our obligation is to the truth.

We know Ida B. Wells. I don’t have to be the Ida B. Wells whisperer to know she would be a harsh and acerbic critic of media right now, of mainstream media, and frankly, of much of Black media, which is not following the tradition, which is doing a lot of, obviously, celebrity reporting, and not really doing the reporting necessary for our communities.

But she certainly would reserve her harshest words for a mainstream press that too often feels very unsuited for this moment, though there are certainly examples of tremendous reporting that’s occurring.