Nikole Hannah-Jones was 11 the primary time she wrote a letter to the editor.
She recurrently learn the paper in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, together with her father and was struck by how Black individuals solely appeared there in tales about crime. So when Jesse Jackson ran for president and did poorly in her state, she determined to write down about the way it made her really feel.
When her letter was revealed, she mentioned, it was one of many first instances she skilled the facility of the written phrase and the way journalism might be used as a device for “telling our personal tales.”
“I may see one thing that I believed was unjust on the earth, and I may write one thing about it,” mentioned the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in her keynote tackle at “Reckoning with Historical past, Shaping Our Future,” the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s 2024 Symposium. “I couldn’t change it, however I may not less than drive individuals to consider it, to grapple with it.”
As an investigative journalist, Hannah-Jones has devoted her profession to highlighting racial injustice round her, a notable instance being her award-winning “The 1619 Venture,” which reframes American historical past, inserting slavery on the middle of the nation’s growth and inspecting how its legacy continues to form lives as we speak.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
“That’s after I began to grasp that what they’re calling historical past just isn’t truly what occurred.”
The yr 1619 had been on Hannah-Jones’ radar since she was 15. She mentioned that as an adolescent, she observed how few Black figures emerged in her historical past class and assumed there should be a great motive for that. However when she took a semester-long class on African American historical past, she realized “extra about Black individuals’s contributions, not simply to the US however globally, than I realized my complete life.” It was transformative.
“That’s after I began to grasp that what they’re calling historical past just isn’t truly what occurred,” she mentioned. Her instructor launched her to the guide “Earlier than the Mayflower,” wherein she was launched to The White Lion, an English ship that introduced the primary enslaved Africans to the U.S. in 1619, nicely earlier than the Mayflower arrived. “As a journalist, I [always felt] like I used to be working my method slowly again to 1619,” she advised the viewers. “[Slavery] would corrupt and corrode and form every little thing about the US.”
Hannah-Jones, who writes for The New York Instances Journal, spoke on the primary day of the two-day occasion on the African Assembly Home in Boston, the oldest current Black church constructing within the nation and a part of the Museum of African American Historical past. She was joined in dialog by Kiersten Hash, a junior on the Faculty.
Hannah-Jones pitched her challenge to The Instances when she realized the 400-year anniversary of slavery was approaching. One motive was that she wished to assist individuals perceive the nation we reside in as we speak and why inequity is so pervasive. However her different motive was that she wished to reply the query that “each Black particular person” will get not less than as soon as of their life: Slavery was a very long time in the past, so why can’t you simply recover from it?
“I used to be like, ‘I’m going to offer the reply to that, which is we are able to’t recover from it as a result of y’all haven’t gotten over it,’” she mentioned. “Now we have refused to be truthful about slavery and the way it has formed our society.”
However, she famous, that’s solely the start — a needed step however not an entire decision.
“Now we have to begin with the truth-telling, however the truth-telling is only the start. No reckoning has occurred. We’re not even shut,” Hannah-Jones mentioned. An unimaginable quantity of labor nonetheless must be accomplished, together with monetary compensation to descendants, funding in communities affected, and additional efforts to restore the hurt “that can not be mounted.”
She requested the occasion organizers to share details about what Harvard has dedicated to doing, together with by way of a $100 million fund to advance the suggestions from the Presidential Committee; the suggestions function a reckoning of Harvard’s personal legacy of slavery. Examples of Harvard’s investments in restore work with descendant communities embrace the Du Bois Students Program, an intensive, nine-week summer time analysis internship at Harvard Faculty for college students from traditionally Black schools and universities, and the Reparative Partnership Grant Program, which is supposed for group organizations to advance “progressive and impactful initiatives that tackle systemic inequities affecting individuals who have been harmed by slavery.”
A significant motive Hannah-Jones focuses so adamantly on monetary compensation is as a result of it looks as if “we wish to do every little thing however that.” She reminded the viewers that slavery was an financial resolution; racism was merely a device used to justify the act of shopping for and enslaving individuals. And as slavery was an financial resolution, it requires financial restore.
“We perceive in each different facet of life, for those who do one thing to me, then it’s a must to pay me for that hurt,” she mentioned, advocating that much more assets needs to be going towards descendant communities. “[If you’re] not speaking about money cost, you’re not truly speaking about restore.”
Towards the tip of the occasion, Hannah-Jones shared a bit about what motivated her to do that work.
“Rage,” she mentioned, which elicited laughs from the viewers.
She went on to say there may be a lot that makes her really feel hopeless, however she feels her work pays again a debt to her household and her collective ancestors, and paves the best way for generations to return. And alter is feasible.
“If you understand that we selected it, you understand we are able to construct one thing else,” she mentioned.
