The 1619 Project: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement and the Births of a Second Reconstruction: From Hannah-Jones to Douglass
As “The 1619 Project” observes, the civil rights movement of the 1960s became a Second Reconstruction, where states like Mississippi (the birthplace of Hannah-Jones’ father) became battlegrounds for the nation’s democratic future. Scenes of bombed out Black churches, White youth brandishing confederate flags, and interviews with civil rights activists such as Greenwood, Mississippi’s MacArthur Cotton of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) cast into sharp relief the historic and contemporary stakes of voting for the health of our nation’s democracy.
The first two episodes of the documentary series ” The 1619 Project,” which aired on Thursdays, are based on a multimedia project by the New York Times.
As the first two episodes of “The 1619 Project” make dramatically clear, “the relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing” of Black people “would help make Wall Street and New York City the financial capital of the world.”
The stories “The 1619 Project” shares with viewers are fundamentally American ones, where Blacks take center stage as among the most fervent, patriotic and resilient stewards of democracy in the nation’s history.
The documentary series provides additional flesh and texture to the original New York Times Sunday Magazine special issue, the multimedia educational social media supporting materials and bestselling anthology subsequently published.
Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”
Hannah-Jones describes the challenges for democracy ahead as having a full story that needs to be told. Her framing ties modern-day voter suppression tactics such as denying voters water on long lines and allowing anyone to object or challenge their ballot in states like Georgia, that were in the past and present, together with other suppression tactics.
This violence paralleled Reconstruction’s bright spots for decades, reaching a fever pitch in 1898 the Wilmington Massacre, the first successful political coup in American history – organized by vengeful White racists against Black political leaders who were slaughtered, humiliated and forced to flee the city.
The show explores the realities of black woman’s racial and sexual reproductive beings in American history. During racial slavery, Black women were raped by White owners who then enslaved their own children whose existence added more economic values to their fortunes.
Our racial identities being listed on certificates of birth and death are more than bureaucratic signposts. They serve as markers of destiny and signifiers of future wealth and prosperity for some and punishment and premature death for others.
During the Great Depression, we listened to some of the previously enslaved recordings conducted by the Works Progress Administration. Laura Smalley, a former enslaved Black woman, said that plantation owners used to breed them like hogs or horses.
This is an incredibly painful history to confront, and one that is necessary in our own time. It also may help to explain how a Black woman as rich and famous as Serena Williams almost died from complications after giving birth to her daughter Olympia.
Our only way forward is by looking back at not so much what we sometimes refer to as “legacies” but through confronting a history that actively marginalizes Black life and in so doing represents an existential threat to America’s democratic future.
The historian Nicholas Knowles said in his book that the reason dignity seems to be woven into human nature is because one is conscious of having it. It goes back and forth between one’s belief in having it and their refusal to recognize it, the opposite of making one’s confidence in one’s own dignity weaken.
It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. This idea was explored in more than one context.
Although he did not write a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell claims that it can be inferred from his writings and activism. According to the work of a man, a democracy is a polity that prizes human dignity. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”