I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, November 17.

With us now is Nicole Hannah Jones, creator of the 1619 Project at the New York Times as a staff writer for the magazine. She had also been

an investigative journalist there, often focusing on racial inequities in education. Her opening

essay for the project won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. She won a MacArthur Foundation

Genius Grant. She is now the chair in race and journalism at Howard University,

where she has founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. And now the original special

issue of the magazine, additional material in the newspaper, and a related podcast series

have been expanded into a book with a lot of new material as well called the 1619

Project, a new origin story. Nicole, congratulations, first of all, on having deepened and

elevated the national conversation about American history and the American present. Welcome

back to WMRC. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Would you start with a little 1619 Project 101 for our listeners? I mean, a lot of people don't need it,

but the whole idea has been spun so much by others by now that maybe it would be good for you

to start from the beginning, for people who've never

heard you start from the beginning. So where did the idea come from, and why a 1619 project,

and why 1619?

Sure. So the year 1619 is the year that the first Africans from the country of Angola were sold into slavery in the Virginia colony.

And so we really marked this as the beginning of American slavery, as the beginning of slavery,

as the beginning of slavery in the 13 colonies that would become the United States.

And the project came out in 2019, which was the 400th anniversary of that date. And what the

project does through a series of essays is really argue that slavery is a foundational American

institution that it predates almost everything else in this country. James Town was settled in

...