From the ACLU, this is at Liberty. I'm Molly Kaplan, your host.

Thanksgiving is a holiday framed by our history books as a joyful celebration between those who arrived on the Mayflower and the indigenous

Americans already living on the land. In reality, the day had marked the end of a brutal

battle where white colonizers attacked indigenous Americans in order to take over and move in on

their land. On At Liberty, we are particularly interested in the project of retelling

history to reflect the white supremacist legacy of so many of our institutions and systems.

This Thanksgiving, we are pulling from the At Liberty Archive, an episode that we believe

has special resonance on a day like today. Former at Liberty host Emerson Sykes

speaks with the New York Times Magazine's Nicole Hannah Jones about her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 project,

a storytelling effort that centers slavery at the epicenter of our country's history. We hope it also

provokes you to question and reckon with

the real meaning of Thanksgiving Day.

Nicole Hannah-Jones, it's a great pleasure to have you with us on the show today. Welcome to the

podcast. Thank you for having me. So this project is quite astonishing for its ambition and scope.

The 1619 project includes several long essays, including one by yourself, shorter vignettes,

works of poetry, photography, and even a curriculum for schools. And I understand a podcast

series is also about to drop. But your introductory essay, I think, frames the project

and introduces its core thesis. Can I ask you to start by reading a passage from your essay,

which is entitled The Idea of America? Sure. The United States is a nation founded both on

an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4th, 1776, proclaims that

all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

But the white men who drafted those words do not believe them to be true for the hundreds

...