“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. The 1619 Project, a six-part docuseries based on the book, is streaming now on Hulu.Īs the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash.

Below, Hannah-Jones tells the story of the fights-among historians and politicians-that the project provoked, including the challenges it faced in schools and President Donald Trump’s hastily convened 1776 Commission, which President Joe Biden rescinded by executive order on his first day in office. The 1619 Project was originally launched at The New York Times Magazine in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The following is excerpted from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s preface to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones