Nikole Hannah-Jones > Quotes

“White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story

“If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, THE 1619 PROJECT: A New American Origin Story

“Our myths have not served us well. We are the most unequal of the Western democracies. We incarcerate our citizens at the highest rates. We suffer the greatest income inequality. Americans’ life spans are shorter than those of the people in the nations we compare ourselves to.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“For a nation steeped in this self-image, it is embarrassing, guilt-producing, and disillusioning to consider the role that race and slavery played in shaping the national narrative.”38 To address these discomfiting facts, we have created a founding mythology that teaches us to think of the “free” and “abolitionist” North as the heart of the American Revolution. Schoolchildren learn that the Boston Tea Party sparked the Revolution and that Philadelphia was home to the Continental Congress, the place where intrepid men penned the Declaration and Constitution. But while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Even as a teenager, I understood that the absence of 1619 from mainstream history was intentional. People had made the choice not to teach us the significance of the year. And it followed that many other facts of history had been ignored or suppressed as well. What else hadn’t we been taught? I was starting to figure out that the histories we learn in school or, more casually, through popular culture, monuments, and political speeches rarely teach us the facts but only certain facts.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“America has a way of dancing with its own delusion.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“This quantum leap served to wrap the Black experience up in a few paragraphs and a tidy bow, never really explaining why, one hundred years after the abolition of slavery, King had to lead the March on Washington in the first place. We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Sovereignty soldiers, Black refugees, self-abolitionists, fighting through America’s history, marooned in a land they made their own, acre after acre, plot after plot, war after war, life after life.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Slavery persisted, and grew, protected by the argument that it was going away.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“Negro poverty is not white poverty…. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“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.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“This is our national truth: America would not be America without the wealth from Black labor, without Black striving, Black ingenuity, Black resistance.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“In 1785, he led a delegation of abolitionists to Mount Vernon to convince the future first president of the United States to join their movement. But George Washington declined to sign the petition or publicly support the Methodists’ anti-slavery efforts, on the premise that “it would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“In exposing our nation’s troubled roots, the 1619 Project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the unquestioned truth. It asks us to consider who sets and shapes our shared national memory and what and who gets left out. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David W. Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, our nation’s “glorious remembrance” is “all but overwhelmed by an even more glorious forgetting.”35”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“I am the American heartbreak— The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago. —Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak: 1619”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“Americans in both the North and the South came to see slavery as a necessary evil, the only way to pay off their debts and build the new nation.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

“Peter H. Wood wrote in a 1999 paper on slavery and denial, "After all, as several eminent academics have recently reminded us, 'nations need to control their national memory, because nations keep their shape by shaping their citizens' understanding of the past.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Jefferson himself considered the people he enslaved in the coldest economic terms, saying he calculated that a “woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”51”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his book Flush Times and Fever Dreams. That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs, and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us catastrophic downturns, like the Panic of 1837, the stock market crash of 1929, and the recession of 2008.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story