Music

And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

In August of 2019, Nicole Hannah Jones of the New York Times and a group of black journalists, historians and scholars produced an entire issue of the Paper Sunday magazine.

It commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival on the shores of Virginia of the first enslaved people from Africa.

It was her conception, the 1619 project, and it took a clear-eyed, unflinching look at the long, painful and profound impact of slavery and white supremacy on the lives of African Americans in our country to this day.

I sat down with Hannah Jones this week to talk about her own journey, her project, and our country's unfinished business.

Here's that conversation.

Music

Nicole Hannah Jones, it's so good to see you.

And I wanted to start by talking about your story as part of the larger American story that you are charting with the 1619 project, but talk to me about your own family and its history, which you wrote about a little in the preamble to the 1619 project.

Peace.

Yes, so thank you for having me on the podcast and I'm excited for the conversation.

I start the six-my essay, which is about democracy, with the story of my father.

So I am biracial. My mother is white from Iowa. My father is black from Mississippi.

And I'm the product of the great migration. So my grandmother brought my father and two of his young siblings up from Mississippi on the Illinois Central Line when my dad was about three years old.

He was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi. For those who know civil rights history, Greenwood was the seat of Freedom Summer, who was considered one of the most violent places to be black in America.

It was a very hard place. And at about the age three or fours when they start putting the kids in the field to start bringing water out to the workers who were picking cotton.

And that's when my grandmother decided that her kids were not going to have a life working in the field. And she loaded them up on the train and moved to Iowa.

And I kind of opened the piece with my dad joined the military and served in the army. And then he flew this colossally big at least in my mind at the time flag in our front yard.

And as a high school student who was, you know, starting to become really deeply aware of societies and equities. And my dad's position in this country.

I was deeply embarrassed by this kind of outward exhibit of patriotism. It seemed to me that he was degrading himself by flying this flag in the yard.

And so the project begins with that and how I came to understand that my dad was making a claim on a long legacy of black people who felt that no one had the right to tell them that this was not their country.

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