The 1619 Project A new origin story

Review by Choice Review

Ed. Note: Choice considers racial justice a cornerstone of its mandate to support academic study. Accordingly, Choice is highlighting select racial justice titles through the creation of long-form reviews such as the one featured here. Though the scope of these reviews will be broader than those applied to the standard 190-word Choice reviews, many of the guidelines regarding what to focus on will remain the same, with additional consideration for how the text under review sheds light on racist systems and racial inequities or proposes means of dismantling them. The intent is to feature important works on racial justice that will be useful to undergraduates and faculty researching racism and racial inequalities from new perspectives. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a reimagining of the standardized American history curriculum taught in mainstream public schools, based on The 1619 Project, created and published by The New York Times Magazine. Both the original project and the book are crafted by Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who began this undertaking in 2019 in commemoration of the 400th year of the start of American slavery. Hannah-Jones, who joined Howard University as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism in 2021, reports on issues pertaining to race for The New York Times Magazine and is well versed in matters of race, history, and disparity. Hannah-Jones is not the only expert to feature in this collection, however. She is joined by coeditors Caitlin Roper (former editor, The New York Times Magazine), Ilena Silverman (current story editor at the magazine), Jake Silverstein (editor in chief of the magazine), and a host of prominent contributing authors. Avid readers of history will take note of pieces by Martha S. Jones, Carol Anderson, Tiya Miles, Ibram X. Kendi, Dorothy Roberts, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Michelle Alexander. For those who enjoy poetry and fiction, heavyweights such as Clint Smith, Terrance Hayes, Terry McMillan, ZZ Packer, Claudia Rankine, and Sonia Sanchez make appearances as well. All together, the contributors boast a veritable bevy of Black thought leaders, scholars, artists, and social justice influencers. The 1619 Project explores a central question: What if we look at 1619, when 20 to 30 Africans bound for enslavement arrived aboard the White Lion, as the year of the American founding, rather than 1620 when the Mayflower arrived? In other words, this collection asks readers to consider the history of the United States through a non-white lens. In 18 chapters, the book presents elements of American history through the eyes of those who are descendants of the enslaved Africans who arrived before the Pilgrims. Nevertheless, this project is not just a retelling of history. It is a time line of important events that centers enslavement, spanning 1619--2020. At each important milestone, the book discusses a topic that sprouts from the existence of enslavement, and readers are treated to poetry, images, and essays to underscore the historical narrative. Chapters address several issues at the heart of American history and politics such as democracy, race, citizenship, and capitalism and elements of the human experience, including fear, the church, dispossession, and justice. Like many books that explore the intersections of race, sociology, and history, this work is targeted toward a broad audience. The 1619 Project sets out to decenter whiteness as the only American origin story and to highlight the contributions and experiences of oft-marginalized Black Americans, and it succeeds in doing so. It centers the Black experience through the voices of poets, essayists, historians, and writers. For example, in chapter 15 ("Healthcare"), author Jeneen Interlandi, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, connects current discussions of universal health care to policies that began with the end of the Civil War when newly freed Black people had no access to health care. As smallpox ravaged the population, Black bodies littered the streets. Hospitals at the time were scarce, and those that were available attended to the needs of white people only. Freed Black citizens asked for the same disease prevention, in terms of sanitation and vaccination, that the Union Army received. After much debate, the request was granted, but when Black people continued to die, they were branded as "unfit for citizenship." This stigma that deems Black Americans unworthy of citizenship is rooted in the same systemic racism that pervades the health care system today. The discussion that follows from this considers Black people's responses to being written off as "soon to be extinct," which has implications that simply addressing the history of American health care has never before captured. Each of the other 17 sections are given the same thoughtful, well-researched treatment. The essays, poetry, fiction, and photographs are combined in such a way that readers are taken on a journey through time. To be clear, the topics and stories in this project are not revisionist, negotiationist, or distortionist. Rather, they present research-based facts and time lines that coincide with white, mainstream history most often taught in high schools across the nation. Despite these admirable aims and excellent execution, The 1619 Project, both the book and (particularly) the original magazine feature, has created a remarkable amount of controversy. Though proponents of the work appreciate its ability to be more inclusive of Black voices, opponents have derided the text and even questioned the integrity of The New York Times Magazine for so much as broaching the topic, much less taking up such a project. Criticism has been loud, public, and at times full of vitriol. A group of historians, for example, wrote a public letter claiming that there were numerous distortions and errors in the original project. Upon closer reflection, there were sentences in Hannah-Jones's original editorialization that drew fire, notably a passage in which she claims white colonizers wanted to come to America after growing dissatisfied with Britain's move toward abolishing enslavement. Though it is true that not all colonizers felt this way, a significant number did. The wording in the book was changed to convey this by clarifying that "some" colonizers felt this way. It is worth noting that after rigorous fact checking, the claims put forward in the book were found to be true. Even in disagreement, major scholars have warned that the book should not be discounted because of such debate. Nevertheless, the book has still been attacked by white scholars who have doubled down on 1620 as the year the United States began. Though these critics acknowledge that other white-centered events in years such as 1776 are viable ways to define the beginnings of the country, they still label Hannah-Jones's work "radical," calling it incomplete because it overlooks the contributions of multicultural and working-class families. Perhaps most jarringly, fringe groups have used the book to stir anger and retaliation. In all fairness, however, such wild claims made against the book are not true. At no point in this book do Hannah-Jones or any of the writers call for violence or retaliation against white Americans. Even more recently, the book has been at the center of the critical race theory (CRT) debate. Right-wing detractors have described the text as an attempt to erase the contributions of white people to the United States as well as to shame those same Americans into denying their heritage. Conservative white scholars have even described the volume as racist and divisive and accused the creators of the project as socialists and tools of the left wing. Still, perhaps precisely because of this blowback, the book has been held up as an example of why CRT is needed in schools, as it features experiences of U.S. laws and public policies unknown to white Americans. At its core, The 1619 Project is simply a view of American history, laws, and public policy from the viewpoint of Black Americans. The book does not deride, deface, or suggest that white Americans be erased from history. Further, it does not claim to discuss the contributions of other groups of Americans such as the general working poor, immigrants, or white women. Instead, the book is clearly grounded in the Black viewpoint and the mission to highlight that viewpoint as a starting place for understanding the origins of the United States, just as other books have done, from different vantage points. Although this book contains high-level discussions well suited for higher education, practitioners, and general adult audiences, high school students will also benefit from many of the essays, poems, and short stories included here. Academic libraries will do well to include this title on their shelves. Controversy aside, this is a wonderful critical analysis of U.S. policy, law, and politics. Instructors will find the book an excellent resource for course discussions on race, justice, politics, progress, and other topics. For those looking to include supplemental work or highlight marginalized voices, this volume goes far to make this happen in a meaningful, enlightening way. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. --Leslie T Grover, Southern University and A&M College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

Journalist, academic, and MacArthur fellow Hannah-Jones launched The 1619 Project in 2019 in the New York Times Magazine to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the pirate-seized White Lion, which brought the first captive Africans to colonial soil in Virginia, and to take fresh measure of what followed as a new nation gradually coalesced, then failed to live up to its founding ideals. The response was passionate, paving the way for this volume of expanded and new essays, each proceeded by an historical photograph and a history-inspired poem or work of fiction by Claudia Rankine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jesmyn Ward, Tracy K. Smith, Yaa Gyasi, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. Readers will discover something new and redefining on every page as long-concealed incidents and individuals, causes and effects are brought to light by Hannah-Jones and 17 other vital thinkers and clarion writers, including Carol Anderson, Ibram X. Kendi, Tiya Miles, and Bryan Stevenson, each of whom sharpens our understanding of the dire influence of anti-Black racism on everything from the American Revolution to the Black church, Motown, health care, Trumpism, how infrastructure enforces racial inequality, the unrelenting financial struggle in Black families and communities, and how Black Americans fighting for equality decade after decade have preserved our democracy. The revelations are horrific and empowering. As Hannah-Jones writes: "If we are a truly great nation, the truth cannot destroy us." This visionary, meticulously produced, profound, and bedrock-shifting testament belongs in every library and on every reading list.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A vigorous publicity campaign building on the impact of the first incarnation will guarantee avid interest in this invaluable and galvanizing history.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this substantial expansion of the New York Times Magazine's 2019 special issue commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in America, Pulitzer winner Hannah-Jones (coauthor, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water) and an impressive cast of historians, journalists, poets, novelists, and cultural critics deliver a sweeping study of the "unparalleled impact" of African slavery on American society. In an enlightening preface, Hannah-Jones pinpoints the origins of the project in her reading of Lerone Bennet Jr.'s Before the Mayflower as a high school student, and discusses the political and scholarly backlash it's received. Updated versions of the original 10 essays examine the struggle for African American voting rights and the centrality of Black music to American culture, among other topics, while new essays by Carol Anderson and Leslie and Michelle Alexander spotlight double standards in the application of self-defense laws and the police response to Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6 Capitol riot. Stories and poems by Claudia Rankine, Terry McMillan, Darryl Pinckney, and others bring to vivid life historical moments such as the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to "one of the first Black military brigades." The result is a bracing and vital reconsideration of American history. Photos. (Nov.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Based on the landmark 1619 Project, this collection edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hannah-Jones, who developed the Project in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine, expands on the groundbreaking work with added nuance and new contributions by poets like Tracy K. Smith, writers including Kiese Laymon, and historians such as Anthea Butler. In the preface, Hannah-Jones shares her inspiration for the magazine version of the 1619 Project and her fascination with history--and who is allowed to tell it. Fans of the 1619 Project will be eager to reread its essays, including Khalil Gibran Muhammad's examination of sugar slavery and Wesley Morris's treatise on the appropriation of Black music. Combining history, criticism, and literature, this book also adds powerful new contributions, including Carol Anderson's study of the connection between slavery and the Second Amendment and Leslie and Michelle Alexander's reporting on longstanding fears of Black rebellion. Interspersed throughout are historical facts about Black people fighting for freedom, as well as archival photographs. Like Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain's Four Hundred Souls, this work asks readers to deeply consider who is allowed to shape the collective memory. VERDICT Like the magazine version of the 1619 Project, this invaluable book sets itself apart by reframing readers' understanding of U.S. history, past and present.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A book-length expansion of the New York Times Magazine issue that explores the history of slavery in America and its countless toxic consequences. Famously denied tenure at the University of North Carolina for her critical journalism, Hannah-Jones sounds controversial notes at the start: There are no slaves but instead enslaved people, a term that "accurately conveys the condition without stripping the individual of his or her humanity," while the romantic plantation gives way to the more accurate terms labor camp and forced labor camp. The 1619 Project was intended to introduce Black people into the mainstream narrative of American history as active agents. It may have been White people who enslaved them, but apart from the legal and constitutional paperwork, it was Black people who resisted and liberated themselves and others, from their very first arrival at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 to the very present. Hannah-Jones and colleagues consider a nation still wrestling with the outcomes of slavery, an incomplete Reconstruction, and a subsequent history of Jim Crow laws and current legal efforts to disenfranchise Black voters. As she notes, the accompanying backlash has been vigorous, including attempted laws by the likes of Sen. Tom Cotton to strip federal funds from schools that teach the 1619 Project or critical race theory. Among numerous other topics, the narrative examines: the thought that the American independence movement was fueled at least in part by the insistence on maintaining slavery as the Crown moved to abolition; the use of slavery to tamp down resistance among poor Whites whose functions were essentially the same as the enslaved but who, unlike Black people, were not considered property; the ongoing appropriation of Black music, which has "midwifed the only true integration this country has known," as Wesley Morris writes, by a machine that perpetuates minstrelsy. Those readers open to fresh and startling interpretations of history will find this book a comprehensive education. A much-needed book that stakes a solid place in a battlefield of ideas over America's past and present. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 Democracy Nikole Hannah-Jones My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was sometimes chipped; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door might occasionally fall into disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the Black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace with a new one as soon as it showed the slightest tatter. My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Black people bent over cotton from can't-see-in-the-morning to can't-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad's youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its Black residents--almost half of the population--through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more Black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad's home county lynched more Black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, for such "crimes" as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl, or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad's mother, like all the Black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library, or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people's houses. In the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of Black Southerners fleeing to the North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon Line. Grandmama, as we called her, found a Victorian house in a segregated Black neighborhood on the city's east side and then found the work that was considered Black women's work no matter where Black women lived: cleaning white people's homes. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age seventeen, he signed up for the army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to Black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American. The army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the Black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the Black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead. So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this Black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused Black Americans, the way it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? My father had endured segregation in housing and school, discrimination in employment, and harassment by the police. He was one of the smartest people I knew, and yet by the time I was a work-study student in college, I was earning more an hour than he did. I didn't understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me. I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn't really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement, and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing Black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American struck me as a marker of his degradation, of his acceptance of our subordination. Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people's contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us. In August 1619, just twelve years after the English settled Jamestown, Virginia, one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth, and some 157 years before English colonists here decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought twenty to thirty enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship whose crew had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day mark the beginning of slavery in the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America. They were among the more than 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage. Before the abolition of the international slave trade, more than four hundred thousand of those 12 million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas would be sold into this land. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the North American colonies into some of the most successful in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared territory across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice and to inoculate themselves against smallpox. After the American Revolution, they grew and picked the cotton that, at the height of slavery, became the nation's most valuable export, accounting for half of American goods sold abroad and more than two-thirds of the world's supply. They helped build the forced labor camps, otherwise known as plantations, of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract tens of thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world's greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even cast with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and carried the cotton picked by enslaved laborers to textile mills in the North, fueling this country's Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people in both the North and the South--at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island "slave trader." Profits from Black people's stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. The relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing of their bodies and the products of their forced labor would help make Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance, and trading sector, and New York City a financial capital of the world. But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of Black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country's history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: it is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy. The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. A right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" did not include fully one-fifth of the new country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves--Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women's and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would look very different; in fact, our country might not be a democracy at all. One of the very first to die in the American Revolution was a Black and Indigenous man named Crispus Attucks who himself was not free. In 1770, Attucks lived as a fugitive from slavery, yet he became a martyr for liberty in a land where his own people would remain enslaved for almost another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, Black Americans have fought--today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military. My father, one of those many Black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That Black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation's capital, are this nation's true founding fathers. And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than we do. Excerpted from The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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