The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience

Preface

I was maybe fifteen or sixteen when I first came across the date 1619. Whenever I think about that moment, my mind conjures an image of glowing three-dimensional numbers rising from the page. Of course, in reality, they were printed in plain black text on the cheap page of a paperback. Still, while the numbers did not literally glow, I remember sitting back in my chair and staring at the date, a bit confused, thrown off-kilter by an exhilarating revelation starting to sink in.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the past. Even as a young girl, I loved watching documentaries and feature films about events that took place in a bygone era. As a middle school student, I read all of my dad’s Louis L’Amour westerns and the entire Little House series because they transported me to the mythic American frontier. I loved sitting in my grandparents’ basement, leafing through aged photo albums filled with square black-and-white images and asking my grandmother and grandfather questions about the long-dead relatives frozen in the frames. My favorite subjects in school were English and social studies, and I peppered my teachers with questions. History revealed the building blocks of the world I now inhabited, explaining how communities, institutions, relationships came to be. Learning history made the world make sense. It provided the key to decode all that I saw around me.

Black people, however, were largely absent from the histories I read. The vision of the past I absorbed from school textbooks, television, the local history museum, depicted a world, perhaps a wishful one, where Black people did not really exist. This history rendered Black Americans, Black people on all the earth, inconsequential at best, invisible at worst. We appeared only where unavoidable: slavery was mentioned briefly in the chapter on this nation’s most deadly war, and then Black people disappeared again for a full century, until magically reappearing as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech about a dream. 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 to either take advantage of that freedom or squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.

The world revealed to me through my education was a white one. And yet my intimate world—my neighborhood, the friends I rode the bus with for two hours each day, to and from the schools on the white side of town, the boisterous bevy of aunts, uncles, and cousins who crowded our home for barbecues and card games—was largely Black. At school, I searched desperately to find myself in the American story we were taught, to see my humanity—our humanity—reflected back to me. I grabbed Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry from our elementary school library shelf because it was the one book with a Black girl on the cover. In high school, when my advanced placement English teacher assigned us a final project on a famous American literary figure, I wrote about the only Black poet I had been exposed to: Langston Hughes.

My public high school in Waterloo, Iowa, offered a one-semester elective called “The African American Experience,” which I took my sophomore year. Only other Black kids filled the seats each day, and the only Black male teacher I’d ever have taught the course. Rail-thin and mahogany-skinned, with a booming laugh that revealed the wide gap between his front teeth, Mr. Ray Dial deftly navigated our class through the ancient Mali, Songhai, Nubian, and Ghana empires (it was he who taught me that “from here to Timbuktu” referred to an African center of learning), surveying the cultures and knowledge and civilizations that existed long before Europeans decided that millions of human beings could be forced across the ocean in the hulls of ships and then redefined as property. It was he who taught me about Richard Allen founding the first independent Black denomination on this soil, and how hard enslaved people fought for the legal right to do things every other race took for granted, such as reading or marrying or keeping your own children. He taught us about Black resistance and Black writers. He taught us about Martin but also Marcus and Malcolm and Mamie and Fannie.

Sitting in that class each day, I felt as if I had finally been provided oxygen after spending my entire life struggling to breathe. I feel a pang of embarrassment now, when I recall my surprise that so many books existed about Black people and by Black people, that Black people had so much history that could be learned. I felt at once angry and empowered, and these dueling emotions drove an appetite for learning Black American history that has never left me. I began asking Mr. Dial for books to read beyond the assigned texts, devouring them, then asking for others.

“Dr. Hannah!” he exclaimed one day, flashing his trademark toothy grin as he put a book in my hands: Before the Mayflower, by the historian and journalist Lerone Bennett, Jr. As soon as I got home that afternoon, I sat down at our dining room table and pulled it from my book bag. A few dozen pages in, I read these words:

She came out of a violent storm with a story no one believed. . . . A year before the arrival of the celebrated Mayflower, 113 years before the birth of George Washington, 244 years before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, this ship sailed into the harbor at Jamestown, Virginia, and dropped anchor into the muddy waters of history. It was clear to the men who received this “Dutch man of War” that she was no ordinary vessel. What seems unusual today is that no one sensed how extraordinary she really was. For few ships, before or since, have unloaded a more momentous cargo.

Wait.

I had assumed that Before the Mayflower referred to Black people’s history in Africa before they were enslaved on this land. Tracing my fingers across the words, I realized that the title evoked not a remote African history but an American one. African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would come to form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They’d arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the English people who got the credit for building it all.

Why hadn’t any teacher or textbook, in telling the story of Jamestown, taught us the story of 1619? No history can ever be complete, of course. Millions of moments, thousands of dates weave the tapestry of a country’s past. But I knew immediately, viscerally, that this was not an innocuous omission. The year white Virginians first purchased enslaved Africans, the start of American slavery, an institution so influential and corrosive that it both helped create the nation and nearly led to its demise, is indisputably a foundational historical date. And yet I’d never heard of it before.

Even as a teenager, I understood that people had made the choice not to teach us the significance of the year 1619. It followed that many other facts of history had been ignored or suppressed as well. 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.

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 North and South profited from and protected slavery. Individual enslaved people, as full humans, with feelings, thoughts, and agency, remain largely invisible, but for the occasional brief mention of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman or George Washington Carver.

Many historians, many of them Black, have spent the last fifty years challenging these narrow views about American history, but this scholarship has often struggled to permeate mainstream understanding of American history. The 1619 Project sought to bring this scholarship to the forefront of our national narrative—to move slavery and the contributions of Black Americans from the margins of the American story to the center, where they belong, by arguing that slavery and its legacy have profoundly shaped modern American life. The project poses and answers these questions: What would it mean to reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country’s origin point, the birth of our defining contradictions, the seed of so much of what has made us unique? How might that reframing change how we understand the unique problems of the nation today—its stark economic inequality, its violence, its world-leading incarceration rates, its shocking segregation, its political divisions, its stingy social safety net? How might it help us understand the country’s best qualities, developed over a century’s long struggle for freedom, equality, and pluralism, a struggle whose DNA could also be traced to 1619? How would looking at contemporary American life through this lens help us better appreciate how Black Americans have indelibly influenced not only our culture but our democracy itself?