The 1619 Project

The 1619 Project asks Americans to retire a flattering origin myth and replace it with a more complete and honest account, one in which the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619 sits alongside 1776 as a founding moment, and in which the wealth, institutions, and even ideals of the country are understood to have been forged through the labor and struggle of Black people whose contributions have been systematically erased; the book's argument is that the inequalities visible in modern American taxation, criminal justice, housing, health care, and finance are not residual accidents but the predictable continuation of structures originally built to protect slavery, and that closing those gaps will require not just symbolic acknowledgment but substantive material redress, including reparations, civil rights enforcement, and concentrated public investment in the communities the country spent centuries impoverishing.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist whose work has focused, throughout her career, on the persistence of racial inequality in American institutions, with a particular emphasis on school segregation, housing policy, and the gulf between the country's stated ideals and its lived reality. A staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, she conceived The 1619 Project to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, and the opening essay she wrote for the project earned her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Her broader body of work has also been recognized with a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and a MacArthur Fellowship, often called the "genius grant." Beyond her journalism, Hannah-Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy to train aspiring reporters in investigative work focused on threats to democratic institutions, and she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting to support journalists of color. The 1619 Project itself has been adapted into a curriculum used in schools across the country, into a documentary series for Hulu, and into a book of poetry and fiction, making it one of the most widely discussed — and most fiercely debated — historical interventions of the past decade.