A Pulitzer Prize winner visits Collingswood on a reading tour
Video: Hannah-Jones visits this South Jersey district
Nikole Hannah-Jones is on paperback tour for “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story”
COLLINGSWOOD – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, visited a packed Scottish Rite Auditorium here July 9.
The flamboyant owner of Ida’s Bookshop, Jeannine A. Cook, planned a sort of “birthday party” for Ida B. Wells, the legendary journalist and civil rights activist who was born on July 16, 1862.
The celebration, which also marked the bookstore’s third anniversary, brought Hannah-Jones to town.
Hannah-Jones is on a paperback tour for her book “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story”.
Originally published in November 2021, the book is a “dramatic expansion” of the essays published in “The 1619 Project,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019, on the 400th anniversary of the bringing of slaves to America.
The 1619 Project attracted some controversy, and Hannah-Jones became the project’s figurehead. It also sparked a national debate about critical race theory and what should and should not be taught in U.S. schools about the history of slavery in this country.
“There’s not much about the project that I would do differently,” said Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter who covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine.
Hannah-Jones: “I felt like I was literally born for this purpose”
But she also emphasized “how nice it is to have so many different iterations of the project.
“Normally, as a journalist, you publish something and that’s it,” says Hannah-Jones. “You can’t go back to it in any other way. We doubled the number of essays in the book compared to the original project, there was a podcast and then we made a documentary series.”
The 1619 Project is also a six-part Hulu documentary series.
“I’m doing very well now, but it was really hard,” says Hannah-Jones, Knight Chair in Race and Journalism and founding director of the Center for Journalism & Democracy, both at Howard University.
“Around 2020, when the attacks against the project were really being coordinated, we were simultaneously trying to deal with this lynching (of George Floyd) that we had seen on television… Then the very personal attacks that tried to discredit me as a journalist. I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t handle it well on social media.”
When Hannah-Jones presented the project, she wasn’t sure if anyone would read it.
It was long-winded and dealt with a topic “that we did not want to deal with and that we deliberately wanted to forget.”
“I did it because I felt like I had to do it,” she said. “I felt like I was literally put on this earth for this moment, that my entire career had been building toward this moment, to pitch this project and pull it off and get billing in the 400th Year of American Slavery. We treat it as an asterisk, a side issue in American history. It’s the center of history, folks.”
It’s also a big deal that Ida’s Bookshop is celebrating its third anniversary. The store received tremendous support and donations from the community to stay open earlier this year.
“We look beautiful,” Cook told the crowd of about 600 people. “This is so beautiful for my spirit and my soul.”
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Hannah-Jones also has great admiration for Ida B. Wells. She even calls herself Ida Bae Wells on X (formerly Twitter), an ode to the late activist. “I consider Ida B. Wells my spiritual godmother,” said Hannah-Jones.
New Jersey was a “slave colony and a slave state”
The award-winning journalist, who lives with her family in Brooklyn, gave a brief lesson on New Jersey’s segregationist history.
“Here we are in the Northeast, and we like to pretend that the Northeast is the liberal, progressive, abolitionist part of the country,” she said in response to a question. “We should be clear about this: New Jersey was a slave colony and a slave state
“In fact, there was slavery in New Jersey until the Civil War in 1865. Slavery was followed by a Jim Crow system in New Jersey, we just don’t call it that. New Jersey was considered the South of the Northeast.”
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