Nikole Hanna-Jones: 1619 Project, “Democracy” Notes and Summary by Nikole Hanna-Jones
9: Hanna-Jones reflects on her family’s share cropping past and her father’s unexplainable patriotism.
13: Enslaved Americans joined the British during revolution far more than the patriot cause.
14: Virginia’s royal governor John Murray threatened to emancipate Virginia’s slave population if colonists took up arms against the British. Enslaved people didn’t wait for Murray’s “emancipation proclamation.” They liberated themselves and presented themselves to British troops. Joseph Harris, skilled navigator, escaped and aided British in their attack in Hampton.
14: Dunmore had “Ethiopian Regiment.” Dunmore anticipated Abe Lincoln.
15: James Somerset, enslaved, brought by owner to Britain, and was liberated because of British Common Law. James Madison worried that British would attempt to limit slavery in its colony. Rebellion turned to revolution when Virginia elite slave holders worried about being in a pincer between British and rebellious slaves.
16: This fear prompted the move from rebellion to revolution. The Am. Revolution, like so much else in American life is slavery dependent.
18: There weren’t many poor people in Virginia because most of the poor were enslaved. The American polity was developed without free white poor people who could participate in the political process. Much of the effort nowadays to keep White elites in control. Here we see the beginnings of the unification across class lines and alignment/division around race.
19: The word, “slavery” isn’t in the constitution. The abolitionist movement began in 1780’s. “They considered the constitution deceitful. They were saying that the constitution was to conceal maybe what…So the South thought themselves to be the rightful inheritors of constitutional tradition. Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom for post-Roe America: “a woman who brings a child every 2 years is more profitable than the best man of the farm…” June 30, 1820 letter to Wayles Eppes
21: This essay jumps around in American history—now on Lincoln—making provocative statements that leave the impression that America is and was essentially racist.
Excursus: On one level its not difficult to assemble historical facts. On a deeper level its nearly impossible to determine causes, motivations driving principles etc. influencing and guiding events.
25: Lincoln thought Blacks and Whites were incompatible in the US and felt that shipping them elsewhere was a good idea. Frederick Douglass resisted this vigorously.
26: Frederick Douglass enumerated some of Lincoln’s shortcomings at Lincoln’s funeral. Lincoln changed his mind about Blacks during the war. This from interview with Christopher Bonner.
27: I may have lost the forest for the trees in reading Foner’s Reconstruction, which asserts, I think, that during say 1865 – 1877 African Americans were the motive force of the American experience. Prime influencers.
29: The author claims public education arose during this time. She praises the Reconstruction period for nurturing the dream of an egalitarian democracy, which was widely desired. Cites David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. This is an important book. In discussing the collapse of Reconstruction after 1877, she mentions Rayford Logan, scholar of post-reconstruction period. He coined the expression, “the Great Nadir.” The longing for national reunification encroached on the egalitarian movement of reconstruction.
30: Alex Ross: “How American Racism Influenced Hitler,” New Yorker, Ap 23, 2018. Plessy v. Ferguson declared racial segregation constitutional 1897. Jim Crow grew out of this. Black service men were accorded extraordinarily poor treatment because military service signaled pride and fresh claim on full rights as citizens.
32: If Blacks came out of slavery and flourished, then slavery itself would be freshly exposed as the brutal wrong-headed institution it was. So Jim Crow and the lynchings were designed to keep Blacks locked in a dehumanized sub-human status. Jim Crow was an argument for slavery.
The Civil Rights Movement, after Reconstruction, was the second great effort for equality. Never have a majority of White people supported Blacks in their struggle.
33: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 upended the racialized immigration system. Jones makes the point that the benefits won by Blacks for Civil Rights tend to benefit all people, especially other ethnic minorities.
34: During the Middle Passage, the many peoples shackled together became one people. People were turned to slaves by stripping them of their humanity and individuality.
Feagin: How Blacks Built America. Stripped of culture, Blacks formed a culture of their own. She says of naming conventions that last names were the names of their enslavers.
36: Blacks have never been the problem; they have only been the solution. She sees Blacks as the most American of all.
In one sentence, the first chapter, could be summarized as: Black Americans, abused, erased, and oppressed, have nevertheless had a much greater influence in contributing to American greatness than the White narrative about them might suggest. Right off, Hanna-Jones gently proposes that American history might properly begin in 1619, with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans, rather than in 1620, with the arrival of the Mayflower. The chapters strongest insight is that Jim Crow and lynchings were designed to preserve the illusion that slavery was the appropriate calling for America’s Black population, which was unable to flourish as a free people. All evidence undercuts the racist narrative of Black inferiority, including the flourishing of liberated slaves, the universal opposition by virtually all Whites including Abraham Lincoln and the structure of the Constitution itself. Citing Feagin’s book, How Blacks Built America, Hanna-Jones leaves the reader with the unprovable but plausible assertion that perhaps Blacks are the most American of all Americans.
