There have been other iterations of The 1619 Project, the groundbreaking reframing of American history that centers the Black experience. It was first a series of essays published in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and it’s also been a podcast, an anthology, a children’s picture book and a documentary TV series. With The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience, the project’s original editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, presents its definitive version. This new volume combines seven powerful essays from the original series with visual elements that deepen their message and, as Hannah-Jones writes in the preface, create “an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act.”
It’s one thing to read about the slave trade, for example, but another to see a high-resolution photograph labeled “A child’s iron shackles” with this stark explainer: “Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: they could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold.” A chapter titled “Fear” includes an essay co-written by historian Leslie Alexander and her sister, The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, that reframes police brutality as a result of the same white fear that can be traced back to the very beginnings of American history. The essay is intercut with various photographs from demonstrations, including photojournalist Robert Cohen’s shot of a Black man in a stars-and-stripes shirt throwing a container of tear gas back at the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Woven throughout the book’s 288 pages are 13 original artworks from celebrated visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems, multiple archival photographs of happy Black families and a vibrant spread of a Beyoncé concert. This visual history is an invaluable addition to a revelatory project and an essential selection for any American classroom or family library.