Five years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones published The 1619 Project in The New York Times. Timed to coincide with and reflect upon the 400th anniversary of Black people’s arrival in America, the project had an immediate, visceral impact. For many readers, the history explored in the project—which centered Black American experiences—was a revelation. Many others perceived it as a threat: The book version of The 1619 Project, published in 2021, has been banned by numerous school districts and libraries throughout the country.
The 1619 Project stands as a reminder of what journalism and reporting can do: reframe the narratives of the powerful few to uplift the stories of the many who fight injustice and attempt to live in dignity. 2024 is a different world from 2019’s, facing a distinct cultural backlash to the types of stories The 1619 Project tells. But Hannah-Jones isn’t done with her mission. Now the first-ever Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University’s School of Communications, she talked with Harper’s Bazaar about the project’s impact, the dangers of our current political moment, and the spaces she is building for the future.
We’re five years from the publication of the groundbreaking 1619 Project in The New York Times. What’s changed in that time?
I think the biggest thing that’s changed is, our country is just in a very different place than it was when I really started going on the road in earnest, in late 2019 and early 2020. Trump was president and a lot of people were really trying to grapple with “How do we go from the first Black president to a pretty openly white-nationalist president?” And then of course, we had a very brief racial reckoning within six months or so of the book publishing. I think the thirst for the project has not changed that much [since 2019]. The questions I get asked have changed a lot.
When the project first came out, people were just really surprised by the project, grateful for the project—it was the 400th anniversary [of Black people arriving in Virginia via their enslavement]. People really wanted to talk about how did the project come to be, and how the project had changed them, and what the project meant to them.
Now five years out, people really want to talk about where we are in the country. People want to talk about the attacks on the project, the backlash to the project—all of the anti-CRT, anti-DEI laws, and what was the project’s role in that … this fight now that we’re engaging in, over what history can and cannot be taught.
It felt much more hopeful [in 2019]. People [were] like, “Oh my God, I just—I never knew this history, and I’m so grateful to have access, and I’m understanding things.” And now it’s just … everything’s going to hell. It feels much more bleak. People are looking for hope, but I don’t really give that.
Backlash has always been a part of the story of Black people organizing in this country—for every step we take forward, the larger political apparatus often conspires to ensure we’re taken two or five steps back. Can you talk a bit about dealing with the backlash, and the despair that can accompany it, as a public intellectual and a student of Black history?
I feel like there’s been five lifetimes in America in the last five years, like so much has happened, personally, around the project, and then just in terms of our country. Some people think the backlash is a sign that we’re winning. People say, “The backlash shows they’re afraid.” I don’t agree.
I do know that you don’t see the type of collective power aligned against the work if it’s not having an impact. I’ve been on tour nonstop for five years. [That means] there are a lot of people who are embracing this history who want to have a deeper and better understanding of America. Just last week, I got two letters at Howard from, like, 80-something-year-old white people who are like, “I spent my whole life and did not know anything about my country, I’m realizing.” That part is true, and the backlash is a response to the impact, but I don’t think we’re winning right now either.
I feel very despairing that, as we’re seeing the backlash, [it] kind of begins against The 1619 Project and then expands to this larger anti-CRT, anti-DEI effort, because there’s just not enough pushback [against efforts to eliminate DEI programs and delegitimize Black scholarship].
I don’t know how we would say we’re winning when the University of North Carolina banned DEI, and [with] the DEI offices and positions that have all been eliminated in my home state of Iowa. We’re seeing that spread with almost no pushback publicly on campus whatsoever.
Folks are also, you know, despairing that this is just part of a larger erosion of democracy. The arc of the universe, as I say, is a circle. It’s not bending towards justice—it’s bending back on itself.
And yet people still want to understand: Why are we in this period? They want to look backwards to the history, to hopefully find a way to get out of this period. I see both sides of that. I just—I’m afraid. I think we’re actually in a very dangerous period.
This period of backlash, what we’re up against—we’re up against propaganda, right? We can spend, as we did on The 1619 Project, months and months and months [researching and writing] with some of the most renowned historians in the country writing for the project, endnotes, peer review—and someone who just has an ideology can just come out and say something and write something, and that’s taken as equivalent to the work that we’re doing.
I do know that the reason they’re banning and the reason they’re trying to delegitimize [work like The 1619 Project] is they know we’re right and they can’t make a better argument. They can’t refute the argument with facts. So they refute with propaganda—but propaganda is easier to soak in, because it speaks to the heart, not the brain.
Our adversaries in this have a different arsenal. They don’t have the same ethics. I can’t just say something—I have to actually be able to back it up. We have ethics as journalists, we have ethics as academics, and frankly, we just have ethics as human beings. We’re up against people who don’t have that.
I know the work that we’re doing is right, but we’re not winning in some ways. In some ways, we are.
One of the ways you are continuing your work, even in this dangerous period, is a new project you are bringing to fruition in Brooklyn. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
I’ve lived in [Bedford-Stuyvesant] 13 years. I’ve had this dream of a salonlike space that brings together books and writers, creatives, culture in a very public way.
I started holding these writers’ salons at my house within a year of moving to New York. I felt that young Black writers needed to have a place where they could be with their heroes, where we could do readings. At one of my early salons, Ta-Nehisi Coates read an early draft of his [2015 Pulitzer-nominated nonfiction book] Between the World and Me on my stoop. We had a microphone, because I wanted my neighbors to be able to hear these amazing people doing readings of things they’re working on. I was really inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. The salons kept getting bigger and bigger, but you still had to know me or someone who knew me to be able to come.
So I’ve been thinking for a long time about trying to open a public salon-style space that involved the greatest attributes of the Harlem Renaissance. This is gonna get me in trouble, but I think the new renaissance is in Brooklyn. If you just look in Bed-Stuy alone—like, the sheer weight of the writers, artists, creatives, musicians, public intellectuals, chefs—it’s just an amazing time to be in Brooklyn.
You know, I got 12 jobs. So time was always a problem. And then during the pandemic, I started working on it in earnest. But real estate in New York is crazy. [And] in Bed-Stuy, because we’re gentrifying, I was like: If I’m gonna do this one day, I’m gonna have to try to own the building. But that’s also kind of impossible in Brooklyn.
I drove by this building on Macon [Street] that wasn’t even listed for sale. Found out it had been Black-owned for four to five decades, and just was able to make it happen.
Timing is sometimes cosmic. It took a year to close, but it closed in the same month as the 100th anniversary of the dinner that’s [credited as the beginning of] the Harlem Renaissance.
Our history, our literature is under attack. Bookstores have always been these subversive Black spaces, spaces of liberation. Five years ago, when the project came out, and then we had the George Floyd protests, everybody was investing in Black stories, and now nobody has the money, right? All of that—all of that desire, resources, that social capital around Black stories—it’s gone.
But for us, these things are eternal. I’m determined to hold that space in this neighborhood at this time, and give us the space of liberation, where Black creativity, Black activism, Black resistance can do so in a very beautiful space.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
