‘The 1619 Project’ comes to Hulu, expanding the story of enslaved Africans
Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses how the project reframes the role of slavery in American society “in ways that we don't know.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, where much of her family still lives. As an 11-year-old, she wrote a letter to the editor of her local newspaper about a presidential primary. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. Close ties to her community contributed to a thirst to share deeper knowledge of the American past and present, which places the enslavement of Africans at the center of the American story.
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States, Hannah-Jones created an extensive project published in 2019 by The New York Times Magazine that excavated 1619—the
