Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Retelling of American History

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who led the creation of the New York Times’s revisionist 1619 Project, finds herself at the eye of the latest storm over America’s past. Offered an esteemed position as a full professor at the University of North Carolina’s journalism school, Hannah-Jones saw the offer demoted to a non-tenured position after she became the target of conservative blowback — including from Walter Hussman Jr., the wealthy newspaper publisher and UNC benefactor whose name adorns the university’s J-School. The 1619 Project, a series spawned in the wake of recent Black Lives Matter uprisings, dared to re-conceive U.S. history from the year that African slaves were first brought in shackles to our shores, to work on Virginia plantations. Americans of all ages desperately need to learn the true origin stories of our nation, whose soaring revolutionary ideals as expounded by the Founding Fathers immediately clashed with the harsh realities for Black slaves, Native peoples, women and workers.

Indeed, Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought heroically on the side of the American Revolution — and was like a son to the slave-owning father of the nation, George Washington — expressed his bitter disappointment in the American experiment after he failed to convince Washington to free his slaves. “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America,” Lafayette declared, “if I could have conceived thereby that I was founding a land of slavery.”

Republican legislators and conservatives are now fighting attempts to tell American history accurately. Meanwhile, establishment historians like Jon Meacham and Ken Burns are putting their own nostalgic spin on our history — a sugarcoating of the truth that I find even more insidious than the right-wing counter-assault. History, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed, is “an ongoing argument” — one that exposes our nation’s deep guilt and anxieties.

I applaud the stand taken by Hannah-Jones, who is demanding the respect of a tenured position before she joins the UNC faculty next month. Her academic battle is part of a much larger struggle for historical truth-telling. As we all know, if the nation can’t face the dark truth of its past, then we are condemned to repeat it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones