Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project, took part in a virtual Q&A for the Penn State community Tuesday night. Hannah-Jones talked about the national attention the project has received and how her past led her to examine the history and impact of slavery in America.
Hannah-Jones said The 1619 Project shows how much about current-day America can be traced back to the arrival of slaves in 1619.
“We tried to excavate this thing that has been treated as marginal to the American story which is slavery, and show that is actually central to the country that we were and the country that we are,” Hannah-Jones said.
Hannah-Jones made news recently when her tenure at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was delayed. After public outcry, Hannah-Jones was offered tenure, but she chose to leave for Howard University instead. She found that people who normally would never have cared about tenure voice their support for her choice.
“I became a symbol of something much much larger,” Hannah-Jones said. “Those of us who come from marginalized groups… know that we have to work twice as hard, we know that we have to be twice as good and that you can do all of those things, and they'll just change the rules on you at the end.”