The Right to Begin Again
The 1619 Project and Who Gets to Say “We?” (Pt. 1 of 6)
Image: A sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Source: Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/new-england/#a-trafficking-based-economy
The idea of a beginning is never neutral.
A nation decides where its story begins not to clarify the past, but to command the present. The year 1776 was not chosen because it was true. It was chosen because it was useful. It cast liberty as origin, slavery as deviation. And in doing so, it allowed forgetting to become a civic virtue.
But forgetting is not benign. It is a strategy.
And in August of 2019, something interrupted that strategy.
No government issued it. No textbook committee approved it. No university press bound it in cloth. It arrived in a magazine—paper, ink, and a date that made no gesture toward forgetting. That date was 1619.
It was not a legal claim. It did not say the nation was born in bondage rather than independence. What it said—plainly—was that the ideals Americans claim to honor were inseparable from the realities they preferred to obscure. That Black Americans had not been passengers in the American story but its relentless agents. Not its beneficiaries, but its builders.
This claim did not pass unnoticed.
Image: An 1847 ad placed by Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance (later renamed New York Life Insurance) offering insurance policies on enslaved people.” The Daily Democrat,. Source: EJI, https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/new-england/#industries-reliant-on-enslaved-labor
Some objected to the evidence. Some debated the footnotes. They challenged whether the Revolution was sparked, even in part, by a desire to protect slavery. Whether capitalism itself could be traced to sugar and cotton and debt. These were fair questions. The Project invited them.
But that wasn’t the source of the backlash.
The problem wasn’t the claim. It was the claimant.
Image: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Source: Alice Vergueiro/Wikimedia Commons.
Image: The book by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” is displayed at a New York City bookstore on November 17, 2021 in New York City. First published in The New York Times Magazine, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” was written to center the effects of slavery and the achievements of Black people in the history of the United States. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
It had happened before. In 1913, when a congressman named John Roy Lynch tried to set the record straight in The Facts of Reconstruction. Lynch had lived it. He had fought for it. But it was a Boston historian named James Ford Rhodes whose version prevailed. Rhodes had not lived it. But he was white. He was called “objective.” And that, in the archives of American memory, was enough.
Image: Congressman John Roy Lynch before 1920, Source: Library of Congress.
Image: Lynch, John Roy. The Facts of Reconstruction. New York, The Neale Publishing Company, 1913. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/14000471/.
It happened again in 1935. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America, a masterwork—its logic meticulous, its research colossal. But the academy held the door half-open. His conclusions were “moral,” his tone “political.” The truth he offered came too soon.
Image: W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, Source: the National Portrait Gallery. (https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.80.25) Gelatin silver print.
Image: Black Reconstruction in America, 1st Edition cover. Source: https://archive.org/details/blackreconstruc00dubo/mode/1up
And again in the 1960s. Howard Zinn, whose People’s History told of slaves and workers and mothers and immigrants, was labeled a polemicist. Too passionate, too partial, too alert to the consequences.
Even John Hope Franklin, with his dignified cadence and command of the archive, was treated not as a peer, but an exception. He was allowed in—but reminded, always, that the invitation was conditional.
Image: John Hope Franklin in 1956. Source: Associated Press.
Image: Reconstruction After the Civil War, 1st Edition. Source: https://archive.org/details/reconstructionaf00fran
So when the 1619 Project arrived—not from a university but from The New York Times—it was not an aberration. It was an inheritance.
Image: An advertisement for the sale of roughly 250 enslaved people trafficked into Boston on the Bante Island ship, ca. 1700. Source: https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/boston/#the-port-of-boston
And its power was not just in its content. It was in its placement. It did not whisper from the margins. It declared, from the nation’s most influential paper, that America’s founding contradiction was not incidental. It was structural.
That was the rupture.
State legislatures called it dangerous. Editorial boards called it dishonest. But what they meant was something more elemental: it was unsanctioned. It had spoken with authority not granted, but claimed.
The story of a nation is never just about events. It is about meaning. And meaning is always contested. At stake is not just what happened, but who is allowed to say what it meant.
That was what made 1619, to its critics, intolerable.
It refused to defer. It refused to pretend that the ideals of the republic had ever stood cleanly apart from the profits of bondage. It refused to pretend that the silence had ever been neutral. And so it spoke. Clearly. Publicly.
Image: mprisoned men at Maula Prison in Malawi who were forced to sleep “like the enslaved on a slave ship.” Joao Silva/The New York Times/Redux.
The truth had never been hidden. Only downgraded. Deferred. Denied primacy.
What the Project did was simple: it named the contradiction at the heart of the republic. And it did so not in the voice of apology, but with the authority of those who had lived it.
It did not erase 1776.
It completed it.
And in doing so, it crossed a line invisible to many—but real. A line that, once crossed, changed not just the record, but who is allowed to write it.
Primary Sources
Bynum, Victoria, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon S. Wood. “Letter to the Editor.” The New York Times Magazine, December 2019.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.” The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html.
Harris, Leslie M. “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.” Politico Magazine, March 6, 2020. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248.
Silverstein, Jake. “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, December 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html.
Silverstein, Jake. “An Update to The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the-1619-project.html.
Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.
Waldstreicher, David. Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
Jackson, Lauren Michele. “The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History.” The New Yorker, December 8, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/the-1619-project-and-the-demands-of-public-history.
Painter, Nell Irvin. “How We Think About the Term ‘Enslaved’ Matters.” The Guardian, August 14, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/14/slavery-in-america-1619-first-ships-jamestown.
Railton, Ben. “Trump’s ‘Patriotic Education’ Commission Yet Another Battle Over the Meaning of Those Words.” History News Network, September 20, 2020. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/trumps-patriotic-education-commission-yet-another-.
Serwer, Adam. “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.” The Atlantic, December 23, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.
Waldstreicher, David. “The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy.” Boston Review, January 24, 2020. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/david-waldstreicher-hidden-stakes-1619-controversy/.
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