The Sussman Lecture: A conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Nikole Hannah-Jones has “Waterloo” tattooed on her wrist. It reminds her, she said Thursday, of the Iowa city that made her — and ultimately influenced the creation of the 1619 Project, a multimedia investigation into America’s racial history developed and led by Hannah-Jones at the New York Times.

“I wanted to show that you could treat racial inequality as an investigative beat,” Hannah-Jones told Drake University professor Jennifer Harvey over Zoom at the 2021 Sussman Lecture, hosted by the Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement. “I’ve been studying and thinking about the arguments of 1619 since I was a college student, and I used to always joke with my editors that eventually my stories were all going to get back to 1619. I always put a lot of history in them, but I was never able to get all the way back until [2019]. Then the [400th] anniversary came, and I had this opportunity.”

As the 2021 Sussman Lecture keynote speaker, Hannah-Jones highlighted how the 1619 Project challenges conventionally taught American history, the subsequent resistance and criticisms of the project, and what Iowa’s challenges are in confronting the legacy of racism. Published below are excerpts of Hannah-Jones’ observations from the hourlong conversation. The full 1619 Project is available online.

BLACK LEADERSHIP
U.S. democracy was never truly representative of the American population until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — the moment, Hannah-Jones said, that the U.S. became “an effective democracy.” That law capped years of efforts expanding voting beyond the original citizen standard: white, male landowners.

“Black people have been the most democratizing and ardent believers in our founding ideals of any group of people in this country. I had never made that connection before, and once I made it for myself, it transformed my understanding of the role Black Americans have played,” she said. “We’re always taught that Black people helped build some wealth through our brute labor. We’re not taught that Black people actually built our democracy through our resistance.”

PEACE AND INHERITANCE
“America has wanted what Dr. King called a ‘negative peace.’ We want peace without justice, to be able to say, let’s not hold on to the bad stuff that happened in the past,” Hannah-Jones said. “But whether we talk about it or not, we can look across our society and see its impacts. Black people and Native people are at the bottom of every indicator of well-being, from health, life expectancy, housing, education and wealth.”

“We do have to acknowledge that we have inherited these things, whether or not we did them, and we have to own what we do with what we have inherited.”

IMPACT IN IOWA
Alongside praise, the 1619 Project received immense political criticism and personal attacks against Hannah-Jones following its debut. In early 2021, Rep. Skyler Wheeler introduced a bill in the Iowa House that would reduce funding to Iowa public schools that used the 1619 Project in history classroom curriculum. The bill was opposed by multiple organizations and school districts statewide, and ultimately did not receive enough support for debate by the Legislature.

“I got some of the best public education, and best-funded public education in the country,” Hannah-Jones said. “So much of what many of us identify as Iowa core values have been under attack, but to see Iowans really rise up against a bill like this and squash it gave me the tiniest, tiniest gleam of hope that maybe we can see the state going back to what I consider to be its center.

“There are some really hard days where you feel very alone, because the people who are on your side are not going to engage in the kind of ugly public rhetoric as the people who aren’t on your side,” she said. “But I also felt a deep sense of pride that the ideas put forth in this project could be so frightening to powerful people — that they would feel the need to sustain such attacks against it.”

Near the end, an audience member submitted one question: How could Iowa become a destination to draw more people of color to the state? “Man, that’s going to be hard,” Hannah-Jones mused.

“When I talk to people who have relocated to Waterloo for jobs, they come into communities where there’s so much inequality, where there’s not the proper support, they don’t want to stay,” she said.

“I live in New York City, which has the largest Black population in the country, and I feel affirmed and happy and grateful every day. … I don’t have the answer for that. I would never want to move back, frankly. I like to visit, and then I like to come back to a community that feels more representative, more welcoming and much more supportive.”

HISTORICAL LEGACY AND REPARATIONS
Confronting the true reach of racism in American history requires deep examination, Hannah-Jones said.

“What we’ve chosen to do is not deal with it, downplay it, because we can’t really grapple with what it means to actually have been founded on slavery,” she said.

Parallels to the German government’s approach to its Nazi history are incomplete, she added: Despite the mark left by the Holocaust on European citizens, the period of control held by the Nazis is relatively short on the scale of German history. Compare that with the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s control over the U.S. economy: 12 million Africans trafficked into the largest forced migration in world history.

“If we were to try to purge the remnants of slavery from our society, we couldn’t honor 10 of the first 12 presidents. We couldn’t honor the drafter of the Declaration [of Independence], we couldn’t honor George Washington, we couldn’t honor many of the people at our universities, banks and industries,” she said. “It is so foundational to our society that you can’t purge it without purging most of our history.”

Hannah-Jones supports cash reparations given by the federal government to descendants of enslaved Africans: “Black people will do what everyone else does when they have wealth. They will send their kids to college, they will start businesses, they will buy homes, and they will infuse millions of dollars into the economy instead of having to often use social resources.

“Morally, it is the right thing to do, but if we just care about our own personal finances and the finances of the nation, it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “We certainly are seeing more political will around reparations than at any point in my lifetime. Even five years ago, you could not bring this up and be taken seriously in politics.”