Part 4 of a Series

Jamestown, Virginia, 1619

“Our myths have not served us well.”

- Nicole Hannah-Jones

“My dad always flew the American flag.” So begins “Democracy”, the first chapter of The 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah-Jones. “When I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me,” she continues. “That my dad felt so much honor in being an American struck me as a marker of his degradation, of his acceptance of our subordination.”

Her father, Milton Hannah, had been born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi, a state where more Black people have been lynched than any other state in the country. He was born in the county of Leflore, where more Black people have been lynched than any other county in Mississippi. It was in Leflore County, on August 31, 1955, that two boys out fishing along the Tallahatchie River discovered the mutilated body of Emmett Till, weighted down by a fan blade fastened to his neck by barbed wire. Emmett Till was 14 years old. He had been tortured and murdered for something he may or may not have said to a white woman in Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where he had gone with his cousins to buy candy.

Although his brutalized head and face were unrecognizable even to his relatives, his mother was so determined that the world be made to confront what had been done to her son, that she insisted on an open coffin when his body was returned to his Chicago home for burial.

Metal collars have a long history with Black people in America. “Hurrying in locked step, the thirty-odd men came down the dirt road like a giant machine,” writes Edward Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told. “Each hauled twenty pounds of iron, chains draped from neck to neck and wrist to wrist, binding them all together.” In such coffles a million slaves were force marched hundreds of miles, from the worn-out tobacco plantations of Maryland and Virginia to new cotton lands in the Deep South. In the process, Baptist argues, “enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world.”

For Nicole Hannah-Jones, that story begins, not in Massachusetts Bay in 1630, but on the James River eleven years earlier, when 20 or 30 enslaved Africans were put ashore by English pirates who had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship, which had bought them in West Africa. They were the first of almost 12.5 million African men, women, and children who were forced onto boats bound for the Americas. About 2 million of them died at sea from the inhuman conditions of the Middle Passage. Most of the survivors were sent to Brazil and the Caribbean; about 600,000 came directly to this country.

It is this unacknowledged origin story of America that Hannah-Jones set out to write – of “a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the unquestioned truth,” – a nation founded on both slavery and freedom, “on both an ideal and a lie.”

It is this story that helped her understand that “the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That Black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true founding fathers.” It also helped her understand her father’s morning ritual because “no people has a greater claim to that flag than we do.”