Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. She is the creator of the landmark 1619 Project, which reframes U.S. history by marking the year 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as the country’s foundational date. This month, two new books that she co-edited are out, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and an adaptation for children, titled Born On The Water. It was on the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans landing in colonial Virginia in 1619 that The New York Times Magazine launched the 1619 Project as a special issue in 2019. It has now been expanded as an anthology of 18 essays along with poems and short stories that examine the legacy of slavery, dedicated to the more than 30 million descendants of American slavery. Many argue the 1619 Project has changed how history is taught and discussed in the United States. Just last year, then-President Donald Trump announced his proposed 1776 Commission at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. in direct response to the 1619 Project.
Mr. Ray Dial is the teacher who changed my life. He is the teacher who both introduced me to how vast Black history was, even though we hadn’t been taught hardly any of it. He is also the teacher who introduced me or suggested that I join my high school newspaper and write the stories that I wanted to see. So I opened the preface for the new 1619 book with that because that was a transformative moment for me. I had no idea that Black Americans had been here this long, that we had a lineage that went back almost as long as the English people who got all the credit for it. That number stood in to me for an erasure and really made me understand as a young 15- or 16-year-old that the history we are taught is not necessarily what’s the most important things or all there is to know, but it’s what someone has determined that we should know and that there’s so much more out there, particularly if you’re members of marginalized communities, that never gets into the history we tell ourselves. That erasure is very powerful.
— source democracynow.org | Nov 23, 2021