Creator of The 1619 Project speaks at University of Lynchburg | Education

About 1,000 people reserved a place in UL’s Turner Gymnasium to hear Hannah-Jones speak for the school’s 31st annual Rosel Schewel Lecture in Education and Human Diversity: “Truth, History, and The 1619 Project.”

The 1619 Project is a collaborative work led by Hannah-Jones with writers from The New York Times Magazine. It re-examines United States history through the lens of slavery and racism, offering the perspective and experiences of the nation’s non-white population. Available for purchase as a book, the project consists of a collection of essays, poems, and short stories originally published in 2019, the 400-year anniversary of the first slave ship to arrive at the then-British colony of Virginia, predating the arrival of the Mayflower.

The project has garnered widespread praise and resistance alike, sparking dialogue and debates since it was published.

The 1619 Project seeks to highlight the contributions of Black Americans — particularly their contributions to democracy, which was a special focus for Hannah-Jones — and broaden and reframe the understanding of U.S. history by offering a fuller picture from the perspective of a population that, despite its significant impacts on the nation and value as human beings, has continually been oppressed, persecuted and stifled.

Taking the stage to a standing ovation, Hannah-Jones shared with attendees how The 1619 Project and the material it covers relates to present-day society and shaped the institutions of power that govern the nation, giving rise to social problems that reach beyond the confines of color and race to issues such as socioeconomic disparities. Structuring a society around oppression, she said, has further-reaching consequences that hurt everyone in the long run. Fighting to defend democracy and make the founding ideals of America a reality for everyone requires grappling with racial injustice and collectively working to learn from mistakes of the past.

When George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by police in 2020, a surge in racial justice activism and awareness occurred, Hannah-Jones said.

As many sought to understand why a society could allow something like this to happen, The 1619 Project became a “lexicon” that helped explain what was identified as a “structural problem” in the nation, she said. A time of “racial reckoning” followed over the next year or so.

Pollings around the time showed higher numbers of people acknowledging racism was a major problem in society, and also showed record numbers of people involved with racial justice activism on a multi-generational, multi-racial scale, Hannah-Jones said.

“We had not seen polling like that before,” she said.

By learning about the history of slavery and racism, highlighting ways society and government were formed around this institution, Hannah-Jones said, this helped propel awareness of the project and of a dark part of U.S. history to the forefront. With that attention came opposition as well as praise, triggering something of a domino effect.

On the heels of The 1619 Project’s rise in popularity came conversations about critical race theory, or CRT, which Hannah-Jones said was mainly found in specialized courses of study in higher education.

Anti-CRT legislation — or, as Hannah-Jones called it, “anti-history” legislation — was quick to follow, ultimately seeking to ban educators in K-12 schools from supplementing their curriculums with this information about historic racial inequalities and inequity.

From federal to local levels, the sentiment has been evidenced. For example, the Campbell County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote in April on a proposed resolution “condemning” critical race theory, despite no regional school systems teaching it. The proposed anti-CRT resolution would specifically ban educators in Campbell County public schools from using The 1619 Project as a supplement in teaching, citing it as “divisive.” The proposed resolution is related to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order One that bans “inherently divisive concepts” from being taught, including critical race theory.

The 1619 Project could not, and should not, replace other history curriculums, Hannah-Jones said, responding to claims that CRT and The 1619 Project are divisive and seek to “rewrite history.” The information presented is made to be a supplement if educators wish to use it, giving more attention to this perspective instead of treating slavery and racism as “an asterisk.”

“It’s one thing if you don’t like the project, you don’t have to like the project. If you don’t think it should be taught, educators certainly are free to not teach it. But to have the state saying it is illegal, there’s a prohibition on teaching it, that’s not something you do in a free society,” Hannah-Jones said.

To that end, Hannah-Jones warned of a greater need than ever to protect democracy.

More legislation mainly targeting marginalized groups, including voter suppression laws such as those passed in Georgia, movements to ban certain books from school libraries, a bill known as the “don’t say gay bill” in Florida that would further marginalize the LGBTQ+ community, and continued anti-history legislation threaten to erode democracy and human rights in the entire nation, she said.

“Right now, we are banning books, we are pulling books from library shelves. We are banning what can be taught in the classroom, and I don’t see the popular uprising against this that one would expect from a free society. That is troublesome, because what we know is that healthy societies do not ban books,” Hannah-Jones said.

Local pushes by some school boards and community members to ban and censor certain books from school libraries have been ongoing in recent months. Most challenged books are authored by people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community or other marginalized groups.

Locally, the Bedford County School Board last November received requests to pull a total of 11 books from any school libraries the titles were found in. After reviewing the challenged books, BCPS administrators said in the March school board meeting the review committees found no reason to pull any of the books in question, and reiterated the school’s existing policy of how a concerned parent can request their individual child not to access a certain book. BCPS administrators said in a presentation that parents can decide what their own children may or may not read, but cannot decide this for all children.

Hannah-Jones examined why history is targeted in these sorts of movements.

“We target history, because how we teach history is how we think about ourselves as a country,” she said. “History’s not just what happened on what day in history. History’s about our collective memory. How do we think about our society? How do we understand who we are? And we’ve been taught a history that doesn’t expose abuse of power.”

Black people, Hannah-Jones said, fought especially hard for democracy.

Until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, people of color faced such obstacles trying to vote that in some regions, they rarely could participate in the process.

Hannah-Jones, 45, said she is a first-generation woman of color to legally have full civil and human rights in the history of the country.

“We were a democracy that was predicated on exclusion. We functioned based on the exclusion of large percentages of our population,” she said.

Sprawling impacts of injustice from formative chapters of U.S. history are felt still in issues such as lack of access to affordable health care and inadequate paid maternity leave, Hannah-Jones said.

Hannah-Jones shared statistics that showed the United States ranking lower than other comparable Western world democracies on every indicator of wellbeing.

“It enslaves all of us, not just Black people. Black people suffer the most, but we all suffer,” she said.

Hannah-Jones challenged the audience to fight for democracy, push against legislation that erodes democracy, and work to make the founding ideals of America a reality for everyone.

“We have power,” Hannah-Jones said. “There is collective power in this community, if we say that we refuse to be the country of our past, and we are going to work together to become the country of our highest ideals.”

Following Thursday night’s lecture, the tradition of which is meant to “educate citizens and focus discussion on a topic that is important to all Americans,” Emma Savage-Davis, dean of the College of Education, Leadership Studies, and Counseling at Lynchburg, said she hoped people would be inspired to work toward a more inclusive society, no matter a person’s background or race, and build a collectively better world where everyone has representation and an opportunity for success. That responsibility rests on everyone.

“I have taught in various different states, and not one child I’ve ever interacted with did not want that dream, that success. Not one parent did not want that for their children,” Savage-Davis said. “But they have to see themselves in order to see that dream as a possibility, and when they don’t see themselves, or see themselves being marginalized, then how can that dream be attainable for them? I’m hoping that we look at that, and believe that everybody has that equal opportunity to that dream, and have equal access to that dream.”