“Making Sense of Slavery”: The challenging evolution of how America tells its story

Epilogue: The Work

Reckoning with slavery in America has never taken a single form. Most recently, the key debates have concerned the centrality of slavery to the American past and present, the proper means of telling that story to the public, and the extent to which the existence of slavery tarnishes or even discredits the American experiment in free self-government.

The culmination of these debates about slavery and US history came with the publication of the 1619 Project as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine in August 2019. The project was the brainchild of a Black writer at the Times named Nikole Hannah-Jones. Back in the early 1990s, when she was a high school student in Waterloo, Iowa, Hannah-Jones first encountered the date 1619—the year of the forced arrival of the first Africans in colonial Virginia—in Lerone Bennett Jr.’s popular Black history book “Before the Mayflower,” which grew out of the articles he wrote for Ebony magazine in the early 1960s.

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In late 2018, the date came to Hannah-Jones’s mind again as she wondered how to mark its anniversary the following year. By that time, she was a decorated journalist who’d recently been awarded a MacArthur grant for her work chronicling racial segregation and education reform. She knew that scholarship on slavery and race had been central to academic understandings of America for decades, but she believed that the subject was still sidelined among the broader public and in schools. To correct that perceived problem, she came up with a plan for a special issue of the Times Magazine devoted to tracing the influence of slavery on American society. “I wanted people to know the date 1619 and to contemplate what it means that slavery predates nearly every other institution in the United States,” she later wrote. “I wanted them to be transformed by this understanding, as I have been.” After convincing the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, to get on board, Hannah-Jones convened a meeting of nearly two dozen scholars at the Times office in midtown Manhattan. When she asked them to list aspects of modern America that had their roots in slavery, she got a whiteboard full of suggestions—article topics that she then spent six months refining, assigning, and editing.

When the Times published the 1619 Project in the middle of August, the front cover of the magazine featured a beautiful, haunting image of the ocean off the coast of Point Comfort, Virginia, where the first Africans were unloaded. “On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment,” the teaser read, “it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” This tone of surprising and even shocking revelations characterized much of the project’s packaging. The Sunday Times that day also included a separate broadsheet section that provided a quick history of slavery in America—including an article claiming that the full history of slavery had never been taught in the United States.

What is the full history of slavery in the United States? That is a complicated question—one that many generations of Americans have reckoned with in different ways. The 1619 Project addressed it with ten nonfiction essays on slavery’s legacy, covering everything from health care and sugar consumption to traffic patterns, interspersed with several short stories and poems. Most of the articles dealt with the latter-day effects of racism rather than with slavery specifically, but the central point of the project was that all modern manifestations of racial inequality could be traced straight back to slavery. As Silverstein wrote in his editor’s note, “Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” including its electoral and legal systems, its economy, its diet, and so on.

The 1619 Project accomplished exactly what every work of journalism aims to do: it drove conversation. Ultimately, much of the discussion centered on the project’s interpretation of the American founding. “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written,”Hannah-Jones declared at the outset of her introductory essay. The radical critique that the country’s principles were corrupted from the start by the presence of slavery has always been around, but it is only recently that it could receive such prominent placement in the pages of one of the country’s most prestigious publications. Later in the same essay, Hannah-Jones went on to claim that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” This thrust her squarely into a topic that had become the subject of heated scholarly debate during the previous decade as historians argued over the extent to which American revolutionaries and later writers of the Constitution were motivated by the desire to defend slavery.

When one of those historians, the Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, first read Hannah-Jones’s assertion about slavery’s role in the Revolution, he threw his copy of the magazine across the room. He had recently published a whole book, “No Property in Man,” devoted to the contests over slavery at the Constitutional Convention, and his research told him that Hannah-Jones had it backward. He believed that the evidence showed that slaveholders at the convention were soundly defeated in their attempts to inscribe “property in man” in national law, leaving slavery as a local institution and instead enshrining the principle of equality at the country’s foundations. In early November he used the occasion of a prominent public lecture, later adapted and published online in the New York Review of Books, to criticize portions of the 1619 Project for their factual errors and “easy cynicism” about US history, which he worried would undermine the work of understanding the more complex dynamics of slavery and antislavery in the nation’s past.

By that time, criticism was coming from other quarters as well. The World Socialist Web Site, which objected to the 1619 Project on the grounds that it made slavery into an idealist story of racial prejudice rather than a materialist story of labor exploitation, had begun to post interviews with a handful of American historians who disagreed with various aspects of the project. None of them were Trotskyists, but all were happy to talk about what they saw as the project’s problems. Not least of these was the way the project dismissed their own efforts by pretending that professional historians had never presented the story of slavery and its legacies to the public—when, in fact, slavery had played a significant role in most college-level American history courses for more than forty years.

Another thing that troubled the 1619 Project’s academic critics was the tendency of the essays to present a picture of relentless racial oppression, as if the entire antislavery movement, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement had never existed, and as if the United States had not experienced its deepest and most violent divisions over precisely the issues of slavery and racism. The problem with the project, in this view, was not that slavery and racism weren’t central to American history—they were—but that the project ignored the fact that they had been contested since at least the time of the Revolution, when Anthony Benezet and his allies first began to study slavery to show what it was like and prove to people that it was wrong.

Wilentz soon got all the scholars who did interviews with the World Socialist Web Site on board with a public letter he was writing to ask for corrections. When the letter arrived at the Times, however, it was perceived as an attack. To some extent, this was a product of the impoverished Trump-era public discourse in which there were only ever two sides to any issue: with us or against us. The historians’ letter attempted to approach the 1619 Project from a more nuanced perspective, one that saw value in the project but also thought it got several important things wrong. “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project,” Wilentz said, “our letter is intended to help it.” But Hannah-Jones and her editor, Silverstein, didn’t take it that way. Coming from a group that included several older white men who held endowed professorships at Ivy League schools, the letter had the tone of tenured scholars punching down at someone else’s attempt to interpret the past. Indeed, several other academics saw the letter as appalling and refused to sign when Wilentz first circulated it to a wider group.

Silverstein issued a long, defensive response in which he name-checked a large group of historical consultants. More letters and essays fired back and forth. The debate popped up in countless conversations at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January, and many popular publications covered the controversy in their pages. Eventually the Times ran a clarification and revised Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay to say that the protection of slavery was “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain.” Nevertheless, Hannah-Jones soon won a Pulitzer Prize for the essay—though for commentary rather than for explanatory reporting or feature writing.

By that time, however, the COVID-19 pandemic had taken over the world, and debates about the 1619 Project largely dropped out of the news. But then Minneapolis police officers knelt on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd for nine minutes as he struggled to breathe. In the wake of Floyd’s death, people across the country poured outside to protest racism and police violence—and to release the pent-up tensions of nearly three months of stay-at-home orders and more than three years of the Trump presidency.

The protests and the broader racial reckoning that followed brought the 1619 Project back into the news. The Pulitzer Center, which had collaborated with the Times to develop a school curriculum based on the project, announced that it was being used in thousands of classrooms. This did not sit well with conservatives, who decried the new racial justice movement’s emphasis on white supremacy and racial oppression rather than freedom and opportunity as the defining characteristics of American history. In July 2020, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, proposed a bill (the “Save American History Act”) that would strip federal funding from any schools that used the 1619 Project curriculum, claiming that the project’s goal was “to indoctrinate our kids to hate America.” Similar bills emerged in state legislatures across the country. They all went nowhere, but they represented the opening shot in what became a fresh round of curriculum battles about the teaching of slavery and race in public schools. As always, the public school curriculum, which sits at the dangerous intersection of politics and culture, proved to be a contentious topic among competing groups that, in this case, had fundamentally different ideas about how to frame the story of the United States.

The book version of the 1619 Project appeared the following year. It debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for months, competing with (and often outpacing) celebrity memoirs by the likes of Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl. In a new concluding essay on “Justice,” Hannah-Jones made the link between the project and the politics of reparations clear. To close the wealth gap that was opened by generations of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, she wrote, would require “a vast social transformation,” the centerpiece of which “must be reparations.” By this time, Representative John Conyers Jr. had passed away, but earlier that year his reparations bill finally made it out of committee for the first time. It went no further, but the committee vote still represented a historic step for reparations advocates.

Public controversies can move quickly, but scholarly assessments are slow by design because it often takes time for evidence to emerge, emotions to settle, and ideas to cohere. In December 2022, more than three years after the 1619 Project was originally published, the American Historical Association’s flagship journal ran an eighty-page forum about it, featuring contributions from more than a dozen leading scholars. “There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude,” the forum’s editors noted. But the 1619 Project merited the attention, they believed, because the public debates about it had illuminated so clearly “the work history does in the world.”

What is that work? It involves the careful collection and interpretation of evidence, to be sure, but its more compelling public task is to provide an explanation to a fundamental question: How did we get here?

We have not reached the end of the study of slavery in America, or of debates and controversies about the subject. For centuries, scholars have been trying to make sense of American slavery—its purpose, its nature, its effects, and its meaning. This last issue may be the thorniest. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, what role will slavery play in new accounts of the country’s founding? Presumably we will continue to wonder how a country established on the ideals of liberty and equality could have allowed the enslavement of millions of people. Presumably we will continue to debate the extent to which more than two centuries of slavery determined our current moment, where racial discrimination and inequality stubbornly persist.

Ideas about slavery are a mirror image of ideas about freedom, and complicated legacies of slavery and freedom lie at the heart of our country. Even though we might have some idea in our head of how those pieces are supposed to fit together, we still struggle to make sense of them in our own way. Sometimes this is seen as a problem or a defect—why can’t we put slavery behind us, or at least come to some agreement about what it was and what it meant? But to some extent this misunderstands the nature of the problem, which has always had a political and even philosophical dimension. It involves not just the evidence about slavery, or its place in American history, but also what it means to be free. This would certainly explain some of the passion that has always surrounded the subject. The fact that we continue to wrestle with it today is a sign that we are still grappling with the meaning of liberty and equality, still figuring out how to put those ideas more fully into practice.

How, then, do we make sense of slavery? Maybe we can only keep trying.

Scott Spillman is a historian whose writing has appeared in the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and The Point. His first book “Making Sense of Slavery,” was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in history. He has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Spillman has worked in public history at the Colorado Encyclopedia, History Colorado, and the Leadville Historic Preservation Commission, and has taught at Colorado College and the University of Colorado–Denver. He lives in Denver, Colorado.