Poured Over: Nikole Hannah-Jones on The 1619 Project

“But we all want to see ourselves in a story of our country. And we call this a new origin story, not the origin story for reason. There are many origin stories; every person wants to feel a part of the narrative of our country.” Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. The Genius Grant), the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, and the driving force behind the revelatory, necessary 1619 Project. She joins us on the show to talk about the evolution of The 1619 Project from The New York Times magazine to book form; the book’s extraordinary contributors, a veritable who’s who of historians, poets, novelists, cultural critics, filmmakers, activists, playwrights, academics, and journalists; the conversations we can’t have on Twitter, and more. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.

Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

From this Episode:

B&N: …And I’m going to quote you from the book for a second: “We all suffer for the poor history we’ve been taught. Our myths do not serve us well. On the contrary, facing the truth liberates us to build the society we wish to be. Fights over history are fights about power.” That to me, sums up this beautiful book. It’s essays interspersed with poetry and fiction excerpts–can we talk about how you decided to structure this book?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: So, in many ways, the book kind of follows the structure of the magazine, which was we have a series of essays, each is tackling some modern phenomenon or institution, and showing through historiography, how these institutions or phenomena were shaped by the legacy of slavery and anti-blackness. We knew that that’s what the project was going to be, and then we started having discussions about the fact that so much of the history of black people in this country is not told, from the perspective of black people, because black people were the only people in the history of this country for whom it was illegal to read and write. You had a population at the end of the Civil War, where 90% of the Black population was enslaved, and about 94% of them were illiterate. You don’t have the amount of letters and books and diary entries that you have from other groups to kind of recreate these moments. We started having a conversation and thought, well, we don’t necessarily have a written record of black people’s experience of so many of these moments in history. But what if we allowed our greatest testimony to the legacy of slavery–which are the descendants of slavery–to reimagine these moments and tell these moments in a black voice?  It was thrilling because we reached out to not just the greatest black writers–these are the greatest amongst the greatest American writers–and asked them to pick a moment in history. We didn’t want to really contain people, we gave a long list of historical moments and said, pick a moment and write about it. It not only fills in kind of a historic gaps, but also gives you some breathing room between the essays…And then there are the photos. Every chapter in the book opens with an archival photo from just a regular black person, not anyone famous at all, but two of the essays. They’re not even anyone who’s featured in the essay, and they go from the beginning of photography all the way to the present time. And that was really Caitlin Roper, one of the editors on the books idea, and it’s a way to force you to pause before each essay and to reflect on the fact that everything you’re about to read affected real human beings who loved, who hurt, who felt pain, which we sometimes can forget when we’re talking about kind of the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.

B&N: I want to step back from the book for just a second because you’ve talked in the past about how be reporters like Ida Wells and Ethel Payne and Simeon Booker and Claude Severin are really hugely important to you as a journalist. And also DuBois. But who do you turn to for literary inspiration? Who are some of the writers you go back to?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Oh, I mean, you know, it’s just going to be the classic folks, I love reading Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass knew how to make an argument. Much as I’ve read by him. I can never stop being astounded that he taught himself basically to read and write and became one of the if not the most brilliant writers in the history of America. Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez. I love reading–you know, he’s a good friend of mine–but everything that Ta-Nehisi writes. I didn’t grow up in a household of high literature. My mom was reading Danielle Steel. My dad was really into Louis L’Amour. I came from a household of avid readers, but I didn’t read Baldwin until I was in my 30s. I took a course on the Harlem Renaissance in college. And that was the first time I read any Harlem Renaissance writers except for Langston Hughes, so I write like a newspaper reporter. I don’t write in that kind of literary… I mean, I write as a narrative newspaper reporter, but I don’t have that high literary background. So, I love to read writers who do. It’s not something I think I can replicate, but God, I love a beautiful sentence. This is a time where I think so much great black writing is occurring. I think it will have to last because there’s so many different places to be published now. It’s much more democratic. What an amazing time to be a black writer.

B&N: And so many of those voices are represented in this book. I mean, some of my favorite writers, Clint Smith is doing amazing work right now. Jesmyn Ward, or Gregory Pardlo. It’s a who’s who, this is really a who’s who.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yeah, it’s literally a dream. And Barry Jenkins, who of course, is a filmmaker, wrote a short piece in there about Gabriel Prosser that the first time I read it made me cry. Terry McMillan, who I read her novels as a teenager. And when we were thinking of writers, I was like, let’s branch out a little bit, let’s show really the spectrum of Black writers in the time capsule of this moment. And I know I’ve said this before, but I see this book in so many ways. It’s just such a testament, like what greater testament to what our ancestors survived, then to be able to showcase. And the thing is, if we had more space, there’re so many other writers that we could have put in there, there’s just so much talent. And the beauty of those voices really creates a course of the black experience. I’m so proud of it.

A few of the other writers and poets and playwrights featured in The 1619 Project include:
Claudia Rankine
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Robert Jones Jr.
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Tyehimba Jess
Lynn Nottage
Darryl PInckney
ZZ Packer
Tracy K. Smith
Yaa Gyasi
Danez Smith
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Kiese Laymon
Jason Reynolds