(8-2-21) The 1619 Project was created by New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones to mark the 400th anniversary of when enslaved people were first brought to colonial America.

Author

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor distinguished journalism award from Columbia University. In 2016, Nikole co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared towards increasing the numbers of investigative reporters of color.

Description:

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) says the U.S. Department of Education has decided to stop promoting the 1619 Project.

“The 1619 Project has proved itself full of inaccurate retellings of American history, putting ill-informed, radical advocacy ahead of historical accuracy. Our students deserve better, and the federal government should not be promoting revisionist history as part of federal programs supported by the Department of Education. I’m glad to see that the Administration has reconsidered inclusion of this false propaganda in American History and Civics Education programs.”

School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Buffalo, New York have already incorporated the material in to their school systems.

The Arizona Department of Education declined a request from a Republican state lawmaker to take funding away from a Phoenix school district that serves low-income students because it adopted curriculum from “The 1619 Project.”

The fight continues for both sides…nothing has been settled for some school districts across the US. The topic remains active and is still a big political issue with politicians.

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