Our Founding Ideals of Liberty and Equality Were False When They Were Written

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all. By Nikole Hannah-Jones Artwork by Adam Pendleton August 18, 2019 15 T he 1619 Project My dad always fl ew an American signed up for the Army. Like many pirates had stolen them from a Por- But it would be historically inac- fl ag in our front yard. The blue young men, he joined in hopes of tuguese slave ship that had forcibly curate to reduce the contributions paint on our two- story house was escaping poverty. But he went into taken them from what is now the of black people to the vast materi- perennially chipping; the fence, or the military for another reason as country of Angola. Those men and al wealth created by our bondage. the rail by the stairs, or the front well, a reason common to black women who came ashore on that Black Americans have also been, door, existed in a perpetual state of men: Dad hoped that if he served August day were the beginning of and continue to be, foundational disrepair, but that fl ag always fl ew his country, his country might fi nal- American slavery. They were among to the idea of American freedom. pristine. Our corner lot, which had ly treat him as an American. the 12.5 million Africans who would More than any other group in this been redlined by the federal gov- The Army did not end up being be kidnapped from their homes and country’s history, we have served, ernment, was along the river that his way out. He was passed over for brought in chains across the Atlantic generation after generation, in an divided the black side from the opportunities, his ambition stunt- Ocean in the largest forced migra- overlooked but vital role: It is we white side of our Iowa town. At the ed. He would be discharged under tion in human history until the Sec- who have been the perfecters of edge of our lawn, high on an alu- murky circumstances and then ond World War. Almost two million this democracy. minum pole, soared the fl ag, which labor in a series of service jobs for did not survive the grueling journey, The United States is a nation my dad would replace as soon as it the rest of his life. Like all the black known as the Middle Passage. founded on both an ideal and a lie. showed the slightest tatter. men and women in my family, he Before the abolishment of the Our Declaration of Independence, My dad was born into a family believed in hard work, but like all international slave trade, 400,000 signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims of sharecroppers on a white plan- the black men and women in my enslaved Africans would be sold into that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ and tation in Greenwood, Miss., where family, no matter how hard he America. Those individuals and their ‘‘endowed by their Creator with cer- black people bent over cotton from worked, he never got ahead. descendants transformed the lands tain unalienable rights.’’ But the white can’t- see- in- the- morning to can’t- So when I was young, that fl ag to which they’d been brought into men who drafted those words did not see- at- night, just as their enslaved outside our home never made sense some of the most successful colonies believe them to be true for the hun- ancestors had done not long before. to me. How could this black man, in the British Empire. Through back- dreds of thousands of black people The Mississippi of my dad’s youth having seen fi rsthand the way his breaking labor, they cleared the land in their midst. ‘‘Life, Liberty and the was an apartheid state that subju- country abused black Americans, across the Southeast. They taught pursuit of Happiness’’ did not apply gated its near- majority black pop- how it refused to treat us as full citi- the colonists to grow rice. They to fully one-fi fth of the country. Yet ulation through breathtaking acts zens, proudly fl y its banner? I didn’t grew and picked the cotton that at despite being violently denied the of violence. White residents in Mis- understand his patriotism. It deeply the height of slavery was the nation’s freedom and justice promised to all, sissippi lynched more black people embarrassed me. most valuable commodity, account- black Americans believed fervently than those in any other state in the I had been taught, in school, ing for half of all American exports in the American creed. Through cen- country, and the white people in through cultural osmosis, that the and 66 percent of the world’s supply. turies of black resistance and protest, my dad’s home county lynched fl ag wasn’t really ours, that our his- They built the plantations of George we have helped the country live up more black residents than those tory as a people began with enslave- Washington, Thomas Jeff erson and to its founding ideals. And not only in any other county in Mississippi, ment and that we had contributed James Madison, sprawling proper- for ourselves — black rights strug- often for such ‘‘crimes’’ as entering little to this great nation. It seemed ties that today attract thousands of gles paved the way for every other a room occupied by white women, that the closest thing black Amer- visitors from across the globe cap- rights struggle, including women’s bumping into a white girl or trying icans could have to cultural pride tivated by the history of the world’s and gay rights, immigrant and dis- to start a sharecroppers union. My was to be found in our vague con- greatest democracy. They laid the ability rights. dad’s mother, like all the black peo- nection to Africa, a place we had foundations of the White House and Without the idealistic, strenuous ple in Greenwood, could not vote, never been. That my dad felt so the Capitol, even placing with their and patriotic eff orts of black Amer- use the public library or fi nd work much honor in being an American unfree hands the Statue of Freedom icans, our democracy today would other than toiling in the cotton fi elds felt like a marker of his degradation, atop the Capitol dome. They lugged most likely look very diff erent — it or toiling in white people’s houses. his acceptance of our subordination. the heavy wooden tracks of the rail- might not be a democracy at all. So in the 1940s, she packed up her Like most young people, I thought roads that crisscrossed the South The very fi rst person to die for few belongings and her three small I understood so much, when in fact I and that helped take the cotton this country in the American Revo- children and joined the fl ood of understood so little. My father knew they picked to the Northern textile lution was a black man who himself black Southerners fl eeing North. exactly what he was doing when he mills, fueling the Industrial Revo- was not free. Crispus Attucks was She got off the Illinois Central Rail- raised that fl ag. He knew that our lution. They built vast fortunes for a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave road in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have people’s contributions to build- white people North and South — at his life for a new nation in which her hopes of the mythical Promised ing the richest and most powerful one time, the second- richest man in his own people would not enjoy the Land shattered when she learned nation in the world were indelible, the nation was a Rhode Island ‘‘slave liberties laid out in the Declaration that Jim Crow did not end at the that the United States simply would trader.’’ Profi ts from black people’s for another century. In every war Mason- Dixon line. not exist without us. stolen labor helped the young nation this nation has waged since that fi rst Grandmama, as we called her, In August 1619, just 12 years after pay off its war debts and fi nanced one, black Americans have fought — found a house in a segregated black the English settled Jamestown, Va., some of our most prestigious uni- today we are the most likely of all neighborhood on the city’s east side one year before the Puritans land- versities. It was the relentless buy- racial groups to serve in the United and then found the work that was ed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 ing, selling, insuring and fi nancing States military. considered black women’s work no years before the English colonists of their bodies and the products of My father, one of those many matter where black women lived even decided they wanted to form their labor that made Wall Street black Americans who answered — cleaning white people’s houses. their own country, the Jamestown a thriving banking, insurance and the call, knew what it would take me Dad, too, struggled to fi nd promise colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved trading sector and New York City years to understand: that the year in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he Africans from English pirates. The the fi nancial capital of the world. 1619 is as important to the American 16 August 18, 2019 An 1872 portrait of African-Americans serving in Congress (from left): Hiram Revels, the first black man elected to the Senate; Benjamin S.

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