Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Educational Value of the 1619 Project

By Zainab Cheema

Nikole Hannah-Jones has made waves by her decision to reject UNC’s tepid offer for tenure for a teaching position at Howard University. While UNC ultimately decided in favor of tenure after initially refusing her, the university’s foot-dragging sparked debate about the politicization of universities where donors leverage their power to shape education. In this post, I reflect on the value of Hannah-Jones’ work in the 1619 Project. In 2019-2020, I used Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project in my freshman writing class, “Race and Justice in Global Othellos.” The 1619 Project marked the year the first slaves arrived on Virginia’s shores as the inaugural date of American history. Beginning as a special issue of the NYT Magazine, the 1619 Project has since grown into a podcast, curriculum, multimedia archive, and a book. 

Partisan media coverage can often distract us from being able to use valuable resources for the classroom. As a teacher, I used Episode 2 from the 1619 Project’s Podcast to illustrate a key point for my students: that issues of race are transhistorical. In other words, these issues reveal the racial fracture lines defining our modernity today as shaped by historical forces, events, and interests. We came to this assignment after our unit on Shakespeare’s Othello. In our class discussions on Shakespeare’s quintessential “race play,” we unpacked the interlocking experiences of characters as shaped by their race, gender, class and language. For instance, observing how Emilia’s gender and class influence her to withhold important information from both Othello and Desdemona about the handkerchief she gives to Iago makes it impossible to ignore the way these social forces influenced Othello’s downfall. Readings from Kim Hall, Ayanna Thompson and other early modern race scholars helped us to connect the racial imaginaries saturating Othello and Desdemona’s marriage to the broader social and historical developments at the time Shakespeare wrote his play. The rise of transatlantic slavery and the growth of a multiethnic labor class in early modern Europe are just two examples of these developments.

Education is not just about creating modules that illustrate the developments of different time periods like attractively packaged boxes on an assembly line. It must always involve drawing connections to our present day and time. This helps us understand our now as both contingent to the past and richly endowed with potential to make new choices and breakthroughs. Episode 2 of the 1619 Project podcast helped my class to connect to our present the social tensions, national issues, and historical developments we were discussing in Shakespeare’s play. Hannah-Jones and Matt Desmond pointed out that slavery didn’t just help develop the modern economy; its management systems and productivity schedules continue to shape the way we do economics in our current world. The podcast discussed how the transatlantic system of slavery sped up the cycles of boom and bust that have reverberated throughout the longue durée of the American economy, including the 2008 economic crash. In class discussion, my students were able to link our discussions of systemic racism in Othello to the economic conditions, fears, and desires that influence their choices today.

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The 1619 Project is public history—history beyond the walls of the classroom and history that is tied to real world issues and concerns. Some historians have critiqued aspects of the 1619 Project on basis of absolute technical accuracy. As one example, marking 1619 itself as the birth year of U.S. history on the basis of the “first” slave ship arriving to North America tends to confine our understanding of US origins to English history. In Florida and other parts of the landmass that came to be known as the continental United States that was ruled by Spain, African slaves had been present since far earlier. However, technicalities do not alter an important fact. As Hannah-Jones observed in her video interview, “erasure is powerful” and public history needs the kind of storytelling that repairs the gaps and absences of black and BIPOC in our cultural and historical memories. The 1619 Project should be seen as laying the groundwork for inclusive and restorative public conversation.

There are a number of resources that teachers can turn to for effectively using the 1619 Project in their classrooms.

• Look through the Pulitzer Center’s Guide to the 18 Essays that compose the core of the Project. The accompanying questions are helpful for navigating the content and sparking class discussion.
• Explore The 1619 Project Curriculum, an expansive set of resources for adapting the voices, viewpoints and experiences of the 1619 Project into K-12 classes. Some activities can also be adapted for college assignments. Look at Activity 5: Mapping Your Community’s Connections with Slavery in Lesson Plans: Activities to Extend Student Engagement. The activity asks students research their hometown’s relationship to slavery and create an essay or multimedia project. 
• Look at the 1619 Project’s archive of videos that introduce the project and demo materials from it. For example, MediaStorm’s video features interviews clips with Hannah Jones and educators that can be played in class. 
• Check out the creative ways other educators use resources from the 1619 Project. 

Have you used or are you planning to use the 1619 Project in your classrooms? Connect with me and let me know.