“We tend to think that history is a series of facts, dates, time, events, who did them, and why, but what we commonly think of as history is really memory,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones during her November 12 visit to Wellesley College as a part of the Jordan Lecture Series, hosted by the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities. The author of The 1619 Project, which debuted in 2019 at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice. Her work has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, and three National Magazine Awards.
In conversation with Brenna Greer, associate professor of history, Hannah-Jones talked about The 1619 Project, an anthology of poems and essays written by dozens of contributors to reframe 400 years of American history that originated as a project of the New York Times Magazine. In it, she centers slavery and the African American experience as the foundation of the United States.
“If you understand this country not as originating in 1776 with these ideas of liberty, but in fact, originating in 1619 with the practice of slavery, and the belief that white freedom is defined by African slavery, then you understand a lot more about this country,” Hannah-Jones said to an audience in Jewett Auditorium.
She emphasized that people tend to forget the contributions of Black Americans in the United States.
“The fact that the first Africans arrived here just seven years after the first English colonists tells you that these histories can never be disentangled, that our very understanding of America has to involve the histories of Black people here,” Hannah-Jones said. “It’s very dangerous that people want to reinstate a golden era that never existed for us.”
History was central to the discussion, specifically what we learn and from whom—what Hannah-Jones called “the tremendous power of who gets to control the narrative.”
“So much of my career begins in that moment,” she said, “the quest to both understand all the history that we have been deprived of and how we’re shaping our society, but also to push back against who gets to create the narrative about who we are.”
Hannah-Jones and Greer also discussed the legacy of the Civil Rights movement and its standing in the contemporary world.
“I spend a lot of time interviewing and writing stories emerging from the veterans of the [movement]. Those are my superstars, those are the celebrities that I want to have, and I go to,” Hannah-Jones said. “It’s hard to sit across from them. And I just think, ‘How dare we let this happen? How dare we lose, within a span of one generation, what they fought and died for?’ So I feel a deep shame. And then I feel a deep sense of obligation.”
Callie Morris ’29, who attended the lecture, said hearing Hannah-Jones speak had a profound impact on her. “I was almost crying at a couple points during the talk,” she said. “She said something about how my generation is going to have to be the ones to fix the damage that has been done to civil rights because the older generation managed to lose a century’s worth of civil rights within her lifetime.”
Victoria Huang ’29, a longtime follower of Hannah-Jones’s writing, went to the lecture for her education class but said she would have gone anyway “just because I’m a big fan of her work.”
Huang said the conversation was eye-opening and motivating, especially in the current political and social climate. “I think it instilled a new sense of responsibility because as a young person, I want to change the world and do all these things, but [I] get beat down constantly and feel like I can’t do anything because I don’t have the power or the money,” she said. “So I think when she was talking, it was like, well, here’s a woman who did everything, one of the most educated people in this line of work, who’s doing everything she can. And she’s constantly getting beat down, over and over, but she’s still working on it.”