Nikole Hannah-Jones, the award-winning New York Times Magazine reporter and creator of the landmark 1619 Project, presented “Reframing History Through Slavery’s Legacy” in conjunction with the ongoing series “The Legacy 1619-2019” on Monday, Feb. 3, in the John Cranford Adams Playhouse.
The 1619 Project began in August 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves brought to America. It aims to reframe the country’s history by examining slavery’s modern legacy and the contributions of black Americans to the nation.
“[The 1619 Project] argues that we are an exceptional [nation], just not in the ways we’d like to believe,” Hannah-Jones said.
While the United States was born in 1776, the moment the country’s “defining contradictions” first came into the world was in August 1619, according to Jake Silverstein, a writer for the 1619 Project.
In 1607, a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia. It took only 12 years before the English colonists began to engage in the slave trade, according to Hannah-Jones. “They purchased the first group of 20 to 30 Africans, and that is the start of slavery and what would become America,” she said.
“There’s a … reason why a certain point in history is recognized as the starting point,” said Mario Murillo, vice dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication and professor of radio, television and film. “And there’s a deliberate reason why we’re not taught about [1619]: because the idea of breaking the myth of American exceptionalism, breaking the myth of liberty and democracy that this country is founded upon, is something that powerful interests don’t want to [discuss]. They want to maintain it because it’s in their benefit.”
The United States was built on the idea that all men would be treated equally because they were endowed with equal rights and equality, per the Declaration of Independence. “As Thomas Jefferson is writing those words of liberty, he knows that fully one fifth of the population of this new country will enjoy none of those rights and none of those liberties, and in fact will not enjoy those rights and liberties for at least another 100 years,” Hannah-Jones narrated.
One of the most sacred documents that belongs to the United States, the Constitution, is a document of liberation. However, “at our founding, we were not a democracy,” Hannah-Jones said.
“Most Americans in this country could not vote. They could not select their leadership, they could not exercise the franchise,” Hannah-Jones added. “[The Constitution] codifies the institution of slavery, it codifies that we will count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for political representation, it allows for the Fugitive Slave Act, which federalizes the ability to take runaways and send them back to their owners.”
Hannah-Jones called the Constitution a document of “hypocrisy” because the colonists, at the time, clearly understood it was immoral to buy, sell and torture human beings in order to get them to do free labor.
“How do we determine when the Constitution says, ‘We the people,’ that it’s not hypocritical that it doesn’t include black people because we would tell ourselves as a nation that black people are not human,” said Hannah-Jones. “Why does that matter? Because we still struggle with that belief today. We still struggle with that foundational idea that black people are lesser, that black people are not fully American, that black people are not fully human today.”
“I don’t really know my ancestors, but … learning about them through slavery has always been something I’m interested in,” said Tierson Wood, a junior psychology major. “And modern-day slavery is interesting … through the years, there’s no overt segregation, but you can still [see] the microaggressions and the legacy through it all.”
By the time America abolished slavery with the 13th Amendment, the U.S. was the third-to-last country to end slavery. “Slavery was so much a part of our country that we were one of the last to be able to get rid of it, and we had the bloodiest and deadliest war in the history of the United States – 700,000 men had to die to end slavery,” Hannah-Jones said.
Those formerly-enslaved people decided they were going to bring democracy to this country and fight for what the Constitution guarantees: liberation, equal rights and equality. “You are here because of the resistance struggle of the black Americans,” Hannah-Jones said. “And yet, as we know, black Americans are still fighting to be recognized as full citizens in the United States.”
The U.S. is a country built on slavery. “We can’t get over slavery as black people because America can’t get over it,” said Hannah-Jones. “So, what if, in the 400th year, we finally stop seeing black people as the problem, but as the solution?”
