Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Not Done With The ‘1619 Project’

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones is inspired by Black people.
“I do have hope in us,” she said during a conversation via Zoom. “We [African Americans] should not be here. We should not have even accomplished all that we have. We serve as inspiration for oppressed people all across the globe.”
The decorated journalist has just released her latest project, “The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience,” a photobook that consists of original essays from “The 1619 Project” and is also brimming with gripping images and visual art that depict Black life, struggle, and most importantly, survival. The book has vivid imagery: archival photos, portraits and 13 original commissioned works by Black artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell and Xaviera Simmons.
Since childhood, Hannah-Jones has understood the transformative power of the written word. But visual art, she said, is different. This art is to be experienced; it is a journey.
Hannah-Jones said that within the American context, art has also played a part in Black erasure, with its failure to represent Black people. In America, art has also created a warped perception of Black communities. For example, popular art of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as greeting cards or advertising labels, perpetuated racist images of Blackface minstrelsy. This damning stereotype of Black people would continue on for centuries. But through its use of visual art by Black artists, “The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience” defies this tale.
“The inherent power of Black visual art is the ability to shape for ourselves how we are seen, how we are remembered, what culture looks like from us, from the inside,” she said. “It takes back that image and allows us to create our own image for ourselves and to see ourselves more truly, and then to imagine different futures outside of the constraints of white supremacy and outside of the constraints of the white gaze and the white imagination. But for us to assert our own humanity in our own way.”
Indeed, Hannah-Jones’ acclaimed work, “The 1619 Project,” has evolved in form since it was first published in The New York Times magazine in August 2019, encompassing an expanded book, children’s book, podcast and Emmy-winning docuseries.
The journalist said Black art has always been political — from the mundane to the extraordinary. She also referred to “The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience” as memory work.
“It is trying to get us to remember a different version of who we are as a country and to center Black people and center Black humanity in our collective memory,” she said.
The art book is interspersed with various pictorial galleries, or “portfolios,” throughout the text, which Hannah-Jones referred to as “emotional pauses.” The photos serve as a tool to counterbalance the selected essays from “The 1619 Project,” which Hannah-Jones acknowledged can be “heavy.” The portfolios have themes like “Testament,” “Patriotism,” “Freedom” and “Resistance.” Through “The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience,″ Hannah-Jones seeks to offer a differing take on the prominent narrative that says the existence of Black people in America isn’t centered on suffering and sorrow.
“All of Black life has not been what white people have done to us. We have created our own internal world and lives,” she said before speaking about the power of the photo galleries in “The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience.”
“They just provide that deep connection to our humanity in this personal way for us to pause in the glory of Blackness,” Hannah-Jones said.
“Our belief is that everybody Black was enslaved and illiterate working on a cotton plantation in the South, and maybe a few of them tried to run away, but most were simply accepting of their circumstance,” she continued. “We actually were fighting back in every way that we could, big and small, and that’s what helps bring us into our full humanity but also reveals the inhumanity of the people who visited this barbaric system upon us.”
Hannah-Jones, who is also the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, said that we were not taught the fullness of the Black experience in American classrooms, and this was intentional. Still, she persisted, offering a counternarrative to the anti-Blackness that permeates the foundation of this nation. Her work through “The 1619 Project” (and its many offshoots) is “the greatest story never told,” if you will.
“What I’ve learned in the last five years is there are so many Americans — Black and not Black — who want to have a better understanding of who we are, who are willing to embrace this work,” she said. “And I’ve just been continuously surprised by the willingness of folks to grapple with these hard truths, to not want to look away from them, bury their heads in the sand, or be in denial about what this country is built upon and what it was done. But to say, ‘We’ve been robbed. We should have known. We have a right to know and we want to know, and we want to try to work through this.’”
As a journalist, Hannah-Jones acknowledged that her work has a short shelf life — even the most deeply reported pieces. But “The 1619 Project” has continued to grow and evolve, drawing in audiences, hopefully, for years to come.
“Before I did this project, I just assumed people didn’t want to know, and that’s why they didn’t know. And I don’t think that’s true anymore,” she said. “I think a lot of people want to know. They’ve just never had the opportunity.”