Slavery is one of the oldest institutions in America and is foundational to the nation, said Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Nikole Hannah-Jones during the Thursday opening session of the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference.
Hannah-Jones, best known for her work on “The 1619 Project” – a New York Times magazine journalistic project that centers slavery and Black history in U.S. history, which was produced to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in what would become the U.S.
She is also in a bitter legal battle with University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, after she was offered a faculty position teaching in the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Her appointment has been the subject of controversy because the board of trustees declined to grant her tenure, though they had done so for others in the past. Hannah-Jones has said that she will not join the faculty next month unless she is tenured.
Though Hannah-Jones did not address the controversy surrounding her appointment, she did talk about her upcoming book titled The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, that includes expanded and new essays among other additional content.
The 1619 Project’s origin goes back decades, to Hannah-Jones’s youth in a Waterloo, Iowa high school. It was there that she took a one-semester Black studies elective class. The class, she said, ended up being transformative for her.
“It was the first time I’d ever gotten any type of extensive instruction on Black Americans, African people,” Hannah-Jones said. “I just understood as a teenager, opening that door just a little bit made me realize there’s so much out there that we hadn’t been taught and that that was intentional, because I had always kind of assumed if it was important, we would have known.
“And so, if Black people had done things that were important for us to know, our teachers or someone in society would have taught these things to us,” she said. “And that class really showed me that Black people had been doing lots of important things and there were lots of books written about it and there were decisions not to teach us that.”
