Transcript for:
Exploring The 1619 Project's Impact

Hispanics African and they took blood-borne known along paths up and down Boston Harbor escaped slave Epona and rope maker he never dreamt a pursuit of happiness our destiny yet rallied beside Patriots who hurdle a theory of snowballs craggy dirt frozen chunks of ice and oyster shells at the stout flame of redcoats as 29 resume turf at a mustace waiting for far how often had he walk gazing down at gray Timbers of the wharf as if to find a lost copper coin wind ever cold air as he stood leading on his horde would stick and then to led bullets tore his chest blood reddening snow on Kane Street March 5th 1770 first to fall on captain's command five colonists lay for cooling hours infernals Hall before sharing a grave at the granary barren ground he had laid a founder in stone for the Minutemen of Lexington the Concord first to defy and die and an echo of the future rose over the courtroom as John Adams defended the Brits call into debt a motley Ravel of saucy boys Negroes and mulattos Irish teas and outlandish jacked ours who made soldiers fear for their lives and a days in only two would pay with the Brandon of their thumbs among the blacks is misery enough god knows but no poetry religion indeed has produced a phillis wheatley but it could not produce a poet the compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism Thomas Jefferson pretend I wrote this at your grave pretend the grave is marked pretend we know where it is cops he'll say I have been there and you might be for mother your name is the boat that brought you pretend I see it in the stone with a gruesome cherub children come with thin paper and charcoal to touch you pretend it drizzles and a man in an ugly plastic poncho circles the mathers all but sniffing the air wearily we don't need to pretend for this part there is a plaque in the ground for increase and cotton and Samuel dead at seventy-eight final son who was there on the day when they came looking for proof eighteen of them watched you and they signed to say the poems specified in the following page whereas we verily believe written by Phyllis a young Negro girl who was but a few years since brought an uncultivated barbarian from Africa and the abolitionists cheered at the blow to count the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling and the enlightened ones bellowed at the strike against Hume no ingenious manufacturers amongst them no arts no sciences pretend I was there with you Phyllis when you asked in a letter to no one how many I am to be a real human girl which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart if I know of may I keep my children pretend that on your grave there is a date and it is so long before my heroes came along to call you a [ __ ] for the praises you saying of your captors who took you on discount because they assumed you would die that it never ever hurt your feelings or pretend you did not love America Phyllis I would like to think that after you were released unto the world when they jailed your husband for his debts and you lay in the maid's quarters at night free and a poor woman with your last living boy that you thought of the metamorphosis making the sign of Arachne in the tangle of your fingers and here after all lay the proof the man in the plastic runs a thumb over stone the gray is slick and tough phillis wheatley 31 had misery enough torn from their native land their friends and their homes they were sold into the markets of Carolina and Georgia feeling the hand of oppression bearing heavily upon them they fled to Florida Joshua are getting the ex out of Florida they weren't headed north to freedom no no they weren't headed north to freedom they fled away from the North Star turned their backs on the mason-dixon line put their feet to freedom by fleeing further south to Florida Randa where Gator and Viper roamed free in the mosquito swarm of Suwannee they slipped out deep after sunset shadow to shadow shoulder to shoulder stealth in southward stealing themselves stealing their souls to run steel through any slave catcher who dare try stealing them back north they billeted in swamp mud saw Grant grass and Cypress they waded the waves of water lily and duck weed they thinned themselves in thickets and thorn bush hiding their young from fees of black skin marauding under moonlight and cloud cover many once knew another shore an ocean away whose language songs stories were outlawed on plantation ground in southern swampland they raised flags of their native tongues above whisper smoke into billowing bonfires of chant drummond chatter they remembered themselves with their own words bleeding into English bonding into Spanish singing in creeks and Creole with their sweat forging farms and unforgiving Heat never forgetting scars of the last fighting battle after battle for generations creeks called them Seminole when they bonded with the renegade creeks Spaniards called them similar ona's Runaways escapees from Carolina plantation death prisons English simply called them Maroons flattening the Spanish to make them seem alone abandoned adrift but they were bonded side by side black and red in a blood red hue maroon sovereignty soldiers black refugees self abolitionists fighting through America's history marooned in a land they made their own acre after acre plot after plot war after war life after life they fought only for America to let them be marooned left alone in their own Unchained singing for the blood that was in order Yusef Komunyakaa reading his original poem about Crispus Attucks Eve l ughing reading her original poem about Phyllis Wheatley and tie him by Jess reading his original poem about the Black Seminoles we will hear yeah let's have a round of applause we're gonna hear more from those three poets a bit later welcome welcome to all of you for a very special evening for what we hope is going to be a very special project we're grateful to all of you for being here there was tremendous interest in this event so when I say all of you I don't only mean all of you who are here in this hall we just had about 800 people tune in to the live stream of this event and that includes around 115 who are at the racial justice project in Asbury Park New Jersey hello Asbury Park as well as a few other watch parties around the country so to all of you who are watching from afar we also say thank you for being with us tonight I'm Jake silverstein I'm the editor of the New York Times magazine and tonight we're here to offer you a little glimpse of something the first glimpse of something that we're calling the 1619 project it's an ambitious effort by the whole New York Times to mark the 400th anniversary of the moment in late August of 1619 when a ship arrived in Point Comfort a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia carrying between 20 and 30 and slaved people from the African nations of nough Dongo and Congo the arrival of these men women and children marked the beginning of American slavery and it is the goal of this project to take the measure of the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life this project kicks off this weekend with a special issue of the magazine the whole magazine front to back is devoted to essays that examine contemporary phenomenon that have their roots in slavery in some cases perhaps surprising to readers it also has a historical timeline that includes a bunch of poem poems and short pieces of fiction that imagine important historical moments of the last four hundred years and you just heard three of those poems it also includes on the same day a special broadsheet section of the newspaper about the history of slavery that's been done in partnership with the Smithsonian and we'll hear from the curator from the Smithsonian who took part in that in just a moment but that's not all oh and I should say all of you who are here in the time center you'll get to take an early copy of both the magazine and the special section when you leave tonight it's a perk of being here tonight you get to have a jump on the crossword puzzle the project does not end there it just begins there next week the award-winning team behind our news podcast the daily is going to be launching a multi-episode audio series called 1619 will have an educational outreach curriculum launching in partnership with the Pulitzer Center at the same time we'll have more about information about that later and then over the next weeks and months you know you'll be able to see more stories on this subject in the magazine and in other sections of the newspaper from sports to travel to cooking to styles and others to keep an eye out for all of that the goal of all this is to change the way people think about American history and the American present by centering the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very heart of our national narrative and tonight we're going to delve into the idea of what that means by bringing out some of the contributors including those three poets to both the special section and the special issue of the magazine to hear what they wrote about we're also gonna have time for questions I hope you have questions if you think of some during the evening save them up we'll have time at the end of it it's it's a long program but it's a good program before we begin I want to say a few thank-yous on behalf of myself and also everyone who's going to be up here on the stage tonight we want to recognize the many people who made this event possible the staff who cleaned and prepared this theater for all of us the folks who are working the booth up there and the livestream the people the people who worked the door which was not easy there was a line all the way down 41st Street and around the block we also want to thank the time staff who produced this event the incredible writers historian journalists photographers artists and illustrators who contributed to the project and of course thank you and a heartfelt Bravo to the amazing team at the New York Times Magazine and NYT mag labs who just poured themselves into this project it was very difficult work and it's been a huge effort over the past six plus months and now it is my great honor to introduce the very special person who's been the driving force behind all that effort the person whose mind and spirit was the spark from which this project issued forth she is a staff writer at the magazine she a MacArthur Fellow she is the founder of the I to be well society she's the recipient of many awards national magazine award a pulk a Hillman a Peabody she's the recipient of an honorary degree from Xavier University and a Lifetime Achievement John Chancellor award from Columbia University she is one of the most profound and tenacious journalists that I get to work with and one of the most remarkable people that I'm lucky enough to know please help me welcome the one and only Nicole Hannah Jones I cried like five times last week and I'm just trying to get through this without crying so thank you thank you for that what if I told you that the Year 1619 is as important to the American story as the year 1776 what if I told you that America is a country born of both an idea and a lie I've been obsessed with the year 1619 since I first saw that date on page 29 of a landmark book called before the Mayflower I was a high school student and I was taking my first Black Studies class and I read these words by historian the rhone Bennett where he describes the white lion which is the ship of course that brings that first group of enslaved Africans to Virginia and he says of that ship what seems unusual today is that no one sensed how extraordinary she really was for few ships before or since have unloaded a more momentous cargo now my script is out of order like most Americans I was taught very little about the institution of slavery it of course explained the American presence of my family and all the black people I knew and saw but like most Americans slavery was largely taught to me as something that was marginal to the American story slavery had to be mentioned our history books because we had to talk about the Civil War but outside of that it was just a brief discussion there relegated slavery largely to the backward South and assured us as a nation that slavery had little to do with how our country developed I studied black studies in college and I've been thinking about the anniversary of 1619 pretty obsessively for the last few years I knew that this was going to be a anniversary that was going to pass in most households without any notice that most Americans would actually have no idea that there was even an anniversary that we should be acknowledging at all but they should know this and I believe that powerfully because this anniversary is the reason we even exist as a country we would not be a country we would not be the United States were it not for slavery when we think about the sheer wealth that the forced labor of those who were forced to come here from the continent of Africa produced for the colonies it was this labor that made the struggling colonies wealthy with this labor that allowed these founding fathers to have both the wealth and the Moxie to believe that they could break off from the most powerful Empire in the history of the world one of them but certainly the most powerful Empire at the time and start their own country we know that the enslaved grew and picked more cotton than anywhere else in the world at the time supplying 66% of the world supply it was the money and the dizzying profits from the enslaved labor that paid off our war debts after the Revolutionary War that financed some of our most prestigious universities that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution was enslaved people who built and laid the railroad tracks that crisscross the south at one time the second richest man in the country was a Rhode Island slave trader who never had to own a single human being but made millions of dollars transporting them across the Middle Passage here in New York Wall Street was named Wall Street because that was the wall upon which enslaved people were bought and sold and the very reason we are the financial capital of the world is because it was there the systems are banking and insurance and learning to collateralize rise up around the ensuring and the collateralizing in the mortgaging of black human beings but much more important than the material wealth that is lay people created for this country what we're here to argue tonight that we did something much less understood but much more important and that is that black people have played one of the most vital roles as the perfectors of this democracy because you see when the country's founding documents were written by enslavers they were false when a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson wrote we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness these are some of the most famous words in the English language but as he wrote these words he owned a hundred and thirty human beings who would enjoy none of those rights at that time one fifth of this country lived in absolute bondage we were founded not as a democracy but as a slave ah cracy a country run and ruled by slave owners if this feels uncomfortable simply imagine the truth that ten of our first presidents trafficked in human beings and worked them on forced labor camps but while the founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that denied the franchise to the majority of its citizens to women to native people and to black people and also deprived absolute rights of one fifth of the population black people actually believed and took those words literally black people responded to their slave and by demanding and fighting not just for their own rights but for universal rights they believed those words that our founders did not from the moment when Crispus Attucks a man who himself was not free who was a fugitive from slavery died for the freedom of this new nation all the way to now when we see the black lives matter protest then we must acknowledge that it is black people who have fought more than any other group to make the ideals laid out in the constitution of reality at the end of slavery as black people who had been deprived by law of the right to read and to write who bring public education to the south it is black people who push for the amendments that end slavery we are the 3rd to the last country in the Americas to end slavery we were not exceptional at all when it came to that it is black people who pushed for the amendments that provided equal protection under the law and granted citizenship to everyone who was born on this land and universal suffrage at least for men at that time and that helped propel the first civil rights legislation that this nation ever passed yet a hundred years later black people would still be fighting for the rights that they had guaranteed a century earlier and the civil rights movement which lasted decades and costs hundreds and hundreds of black lives set the stage for all other civil rights battles that this country would face immigrant rights gay rights women's rights Disability Rights all of these rights find their inheritance in the black rights struggle the civil rights victories of black people one never ensured rights just for themselves but for all marginalized people across this nation we are unique people on the soil we came here under singular circumstances no other group was forced to come here and change in the bowels of a ship no other group was completely severed from their homeland from their families from their languages from their culture from their religion but a sociologist Glenn Bracy wrote out of the ashes of white denigration we gave birth to ourselves those who were enslaved who were treated not as human beings but as property created ourselves a new culture here isolated both from our native lands and forcibly segregated from both mainstream white culture and from our home we created what became really the only truly unique American culture that exists you could say that those who are considered the least American have actually turned out to be the most when the world hears quintessential American music it is our voice that they hear when they see the unique style and the avant-garde Flair of black Americans this came from enslaved people's determination to exert our individuality in a system of chattel slavery that tried to take every sense of our humanity when people snicker at black naming practices those naming practices of our most marginalized who refuse to take the European names of the people who owned us but also to take the names of African continent from which we've never visited but to create our own this is an act of resistance it is not something for us to divide the things that we have most maligned about black people have actually been signs of our resilience and our determination to thrive under the most brutal circumstances the black people are very inconvenient to this country's narratives in order to justify slavery and our original sin and the fact that we were not an exceptional nation but one of a many slave Nations we had to say the black people were the problem and we have spent four hundred years studying the way the black people are the problem I would like to offer tonight in this 400th year we need to stop thinking of black people as the problem and start seeing us as a solution my grandmother our Lena Tillett was born on a sharecropping farm in Greenwood Mississippi she spent most of her adult life under a racial apartheid she'd move north thinking things were gonna be better but she didn't find a promised land there either she never got to live her dreams like so many of our ancestors she bore what she did so that we might be here today and though she did not live to see this moment though so many of our ancestors did not live to see this moment we the 40 million descendants of those who are displayed enslaved in this country we are the testimony this project is above all else an attempt to set the record straight to finally in this 400th year to tell the truth about who we are as a people and who we are as a nation and who we can be if we ever are willing to give up that lie it is time to stop hiding our sins but to confront them and then in confronting them it is time to make them right I thank you all for coming and joining us tonight and I hope that this is the place where we start thank you [Applause] thank you one of the reasons that I believe this project was necessary is because we don't teach the history of slavery in our schools we cannot confront this and so it's hard to understand where we are today when we don't understand the past and what we get about slavery is not the unvarnished truth so part of our effort is we created this special broadsheet section of the paper and we produce it in collaboration with the Smithsonian and in doing so we're trying to set the record straight if you haven't been to the National Museum of african-american history and culture in Washington DC you absolutely should I've been four or five times it's still not enough it refrains the way that we see this history much as we're trying to do today and so our first guest is the woman who Koch curated the slavery and freedom exhibit at the Museum she collaborated with us on the newspaper section she picked the objects that are in there she helped us write this story the first time I met her I told her she was going to be my best friend because she's just that amazing please welcome the Smithsonian's curator of American slavery Mary Elliot [Applause] good evening hey Mary hey Nicole and a long journey together right yes but a good one so mm-hmm Mary is going in the the way that we decided to do the special section we were inspired actually by the exhibit that Mary helped curate at the Museum so the special section is told through objects objects of the time of slavery and Mary is going to take us through three objects that appear in the special section and talk to us about what they mean and why they're important so Mary the first object that you're going to start with is an image of a sugar cane cutter so talk to us about that so as Nicole mentioned we use objects to tell the story and oftentimes people expect to walk into an exhibition and see an object and see this kind of description this is a cane cutter this size made of wood made of metal but this like this moment of 1619 this anniversary opens up an opportunity to talk more in depth about slavery and freedom in this country and about slavery and freedom in the world but the cane cutter allows us to talk about sugar most often when we think about slavery in the United States we think cotton but the transatlantic slave trade the driver of the trade was sugar it was the commodity that everyone filled for right we had to anticipate what people would ask when they came into the exhibition and one of the things we knew people would say in their effort to mitigate slavery in the United States was well we only have four hundred thousand people come to the United States and there were millions more who went to South America and the Caribbean why because this was a deadly commodity life span to cultivate sugar was seven years life expectancy and it altered women's reproductive systems and so for people to wrap their head around the fact that in the United States it was cotton wheat sugar rice tobacco and that we perfected natural increase 400,000 people came to what became the United States but at the end of the civil war there were four million enslaved African Americans who gained their freedom so the next image is the ballast stone the ballast stone so we have a program called the slave wrecks project we go around and we look at slave shipwrecks around the world we try to identify them authenticate them and raise artifacts from the ocean floor the ballast stone is from the South shows a a slave ship that left Lisbon went to Mozambique picked up captive Africans was on its way to Brazil to sell them into slavery in Brazil it crashed off the coast of South Africa there were five hundred and twelve enslaved Africans on board 212 perished the others were saved why because they were property and they're for profit they were sold into slavery but the ballast stone what's important about that is it was the marker that helped us identify the ship because ballast stones offset the human weight so the ships wouldn't turn over through doing archival research and maritime archaeology we were able to identify this ship because the records show that there were 14 ballast stones of 1,400 ballast stones aboard this ship and when you think about it think about how we read our landscape balance stones cover the streets in Charleston South Carolina they come in different forms in st. Croix the ballast stones cover all of that landscape in the form of yellow bricks so this is history in plain sight you can't mitigate slavery there's no such thing as a little bit of slavery and then the last image we're going to talk about is the Lowcountry basket first tell me why this was important for you to include and then tell us why it matters the Lowcountry basket like the other artifacts open up conversation about many different things one thing that is extremely important is people say well they came with nothing really we came with empty hands but we did not come with empty heads we have memories of our grandmother's our foodways the way we dress ourselves our governmental organizations our military power our intellect and so people came with empty hands but their intellect helped create an economic system that made this nation a powerhouse when we went to visit the rice fields in Charleston and we went to a place called kaw kaw the gentlemen there who oversees that historic site said that a group of German engineers hydraulic engineer said there's no way anyone could recreate the landscape that these intellectual people of African descent created that profitable landscape and also the fact that this coil basket reminds you of the coil designs of the Fanta baskets here you have this object that was used practically to separate the rice but then also women putting their children in the baskets as they were doing the work that they were forced to perform and so it really does open up a story about the history of this fight for power economic political that came with a human cost I think that this is a particularly important thing to pause on because what a lot of people don't know is enslaved people were brought from certain regions of Africa because of the particular knowledge that they had we're often taught that they were simply there to be for brute labor had no skills we know that they taught southern planters how to grow rice that they came with our working skills can you talk more about that clearly the perception that African people came with no intellect only this is just a further justification for slavery but we know that that's not true no there are Europeans who traveled throughout the Western African coastline and when people say you know well it's hard to get the records of observations of all of this activity going on Europeans who documented the way that people of African descent were cultivating rice and they were digging those trenches and using the trunk system flooding the fields and so they actually selected people from you can literally look at the the announcements the advertisements in the 18th century newspapers that say windward and rice coasts Africans for sale in Charleston or Charlestown so when people you know when folks say well that that did didn't happen go to the record it's documented in a very unapologetic voice as one man said in the 18th century William CalPERS I admit I am sickened at the purchase of slaves but I must be mum for how would we do without sugar or rum there was no reason to cover anything up because as far as that society was concerned it was fine but with that mere quote it makes you question your moral obligation to others well thank you so much for highlighting these objects for us please spend a lot of time with the special section that that Mary Elliott helped cure a I just think you will get a real schooling on this history and I thank you for coming tonight and for your contribution to the project thank you for this opportunity thank you everyone thank you again to Mary it was such an honor for us at the magazine and it NYT mag labs to get to work with Mary and the team at the Smithsonian to really ground this project in their knowledge and in in their wisdom and in in in their historical rigor obviously history is the kind of foundation of this project but a lot of the history that we are interested in bringing forth with this project was not fully recorded and so in addition to turning to historians like Mary people who can you know who can give us the facts we also wanted to use imagination to find our way into the past and so as part of this project we asked a number of creative writers to imagine their way into key moments on a historical timeline of the past 400 years so we had poets we had novelists we had some screenwriters some playwrights the timeline ran from August 1619 to August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and exposed vividly that city's racial inequalities we had Barry Jenkins writing about Gabriel Prosser's rebellion we had Jasmine Ward writing about how the Congress is ban on the importation of enslaved people in 1808 only led to the intensification of the buying and selling of enslaved people and the further breaking up of black families we had ZZ Packer writing about the massacre in New Orleans in 1866 Rita Dove and Lynn Nottage or Rita Dove and Camille Dungy rather both writing about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and Joshua Bennett writing about the founding of the Black Panther Party and if any of those moments are unfamiliar to you I invite you to you know turn to this historical timeline to to learn more about about these moments these important moments in American history earlier tonight to begin the evening you heard three of the poems that are part of this historical timeline you heard Yusef Komunyakaa writing about Crispus Attucks a fugitive from slavery who was the first person to die in the American Revolution you heard evaluate writing about Phyllis Wheatley the first african-american person to publish a book of poetry in this country and you heard to him by Jess reading his poem about the Black Seminoles so we're going to get to talk to them about their three poems right now here we are and the first thing that I want to do is to give you three a proper introduction because due to the drama of our opening you didn't get to do it a proper introduction before so we'll start with you to him but to him Burgess is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island the author of two books of poetry his first collection Leadbelly was published in 2005 his second olio a combination of sonnets and narrative which demonstrate the ways that african-american performers have resisted and defeated the forces of minstrels he won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry to his left we have dr. evil Ewing she's a writer sociologist and assistant professor at the School of Social Service administration at the University of Chicago and she's the author of ghosts in the school yard a rigorous study of Chicago Public Schools see we have some people from Chicago electric ash is a collection of yeah I'm sorry arches a collection of poetry essays and visual art and earlier this summer she published in 1919 a collection of poems shaped by that year's race riots Eve also writes the iron heart comic book series from Marvel The Collected first volume which was released earlier this summer and then to Eve's left we have Yusef Komunyakaa an award-winning poet a professor of English at NYU and the author of numerous collections of poetry including copasetic DNA ooh and neon vernacular which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry from 99 to 2005 he was a Chancellor of the Academy of American poets and in 2016 he was named New York state's poet laureate please help me welcome these three wonderful so it's it was an honor to get to have your work in this this issue of the magazine and I wanted to start by asking you the way we did this is that we had a list of events I can't remember how many but it was a lot in the end we published we were able due to space and you know deadlines and all that to publish 17 moments on this historical timeline but we started out with many more and we sent out this list to you and the other folks who contribute to this project and people picked the event that resonated with them you know and that they wanted to write about so each of you picked your moments and I'd like to start by just asking you and perhaps we can go in chronological order Yusef starting starting with you what it was that drew you to the moment in your case Crispus Attucks the first person to be killed in the American Revolution well what was interesting to me about this individual is that he seems so ordinary but yet he was an escaped slave so he had a certain kind of spirit and tenacity that he could push against veins he also knew how to work with his hands so I come from that group of people without a work with their hands physical labor but there is there is also the feeling that it was impulsive it was an impulsive action it wasn't a planned action it was just part of his DNA we can say today so for me it was the fact that the spirit of the individual was universal he knew what freedom was I think about what Toni Morrison said she said the funk freedom of the function of freedom is the free others but this is already playing out a long time ago probably at least before 1619 because of the people who were brought here many of them have been captured as prisoners of war so the fight was in them Eve maybe we could then move to you and why was it that Phyllis Wheatley was the thing person on that list that you thought I want to write about that sure well it was a really difficult choice because as you said it was a long list and it's such an ambitious project 400 years of black history all of which is worth talking about but I think I felt a sense of obligation to uplift the voice and the story of Phyllis Wheatley as a black woman poet myself and as someone who thinks a lot about the ways in which black women are marginalized even within stories about black history and our narratives about black history as well as thinking about black literary history I felt an obligation to her as I used the word for mother in the poem and she lived a very difficult and short life and there's a way in which when you are a person who's lauded or who gets to be the first of something it's presumed that that that all that kind of laudatory experience just meant that you had an easy life and so I like probably many of us saw her on lots of you know like exemplary Negro history book list posters on classroom walls and things like that as a kid but didn't actually know a lot about her and in diving into her life felt deeply deeply saddened by really what happened to her and her experiences and felt obligated to tell that story and really grateful that I had the chance to me what were some of the things that you learned when you dove into her story sure so as I you know I begin the poem with this quotation from Thomas Jefferson and it was it was common belief among many of the people we consider the intellectual architects of Western thought that black people were not capable of making art so you hear the quote from Hume from Conte from Jefferson those voices throughout the poem and in order so when Phyllis Wheatley was was purchased as a seven year old and she came straight from Senegal she was born on the African continent and when she was purchased she right away started to display these unusual habits she started writing poetry at a really young age as someone who had only recently learned English and nobody believed that a black woman could write poetry that a black person could write poetry I mean this was like I mean believed on a level of like scientific possibility and so many of who we'd now consider the forefathers of this country actually had to show up and sign an affidavit they quizzed her they interviewed her they asked her questions about herself and about her poems and then they created this statement saying yes we can attest that she she really wrote these poems and so that's the proof that is the you know they had to it was only real when a group of white men said we witnessed it for ourselves she really did write them herself I've had experiences like that in my own life but and the and then the the terrible irony of it is that during the Black Arts Movement a lot of the poets that I grew up admiring the most actually very much disparage Phyllis Wheatley because of some of the poems that she wrote that were seen to be not adequately political or not adequately critical of slavery and so once again she had to kind of prove people said that she wasn't black enough about a woman who was literally enslaved you know people 100 years said she wasn't black enough and so throughout her life and her legacy even and death having to kind of prove herself was this ultimate tragedy to me I want to come back to some of those points in a minute but to him but can we talk about your your selection and what it was about the Black Seminole story that appealed to you and you were looking at that list well I think the thing about the Black Seminoles is you're talking about really the idea that really the first Underground Railroad ran south you're talking about folks in South Carolina bristling under under slavery and deciding not to go north to the North Star but to go south to Florida which was at that time in a Spanish territory and living there at first under Spanish Dominion as Spanish citizens and then when the Spanish left staying there and communing with the creek and really establishing really the largest and most successful slave revolt in the United States which you're talking about communities of hundreds of black folks and Reb folks living in Florida and fighting successive Wars three three separate Wars with generals and people like Abraham Osceola Juan kavaja also known as John horse fighting up fighting over generations and then signing a treaty with the United States moving to Oklahoma and then later on moving south of the border to Mexico where some of them their descendants still are today in Lowton got Nascimento de los negros which is it's just a fascinating story which runs all the way through American history up until today which I was upset that I did not find out about when I was being taught black history do I mean all the way through college at cetera et cetera so that's that's what that's what intrigued I want to dig into the history in the poem is a little bit in more detail and you seventh want to come back to e to you for this there's a interesting moment you said that what drew you to this poem was Crispus Attucks this this this you know average person who had this kind of vivid sense of freedom and he is the hero of the poem of course but there's an interesting kind of unheroic entrance by john adams our second president comes in I think in the third or fourth stanza to the end and I'm you know I want to make sure that people understand exactly what's happening there so John Adams is the British soldiers after this this little skirmish they've they've shot and killed some some colonists including Crispus Attucks and can you talk about what happens there and why it felt like the right ending to the poem for you and you mentioned that it I think you say an echo of the Future came you comes over Rose over the courtroom as John Adams defended the Brits maybe what you meant by an echo of the future there well essentially I think it's a moment where class comes in especially the way that John Adams define you know says Irish Teague's you know it's all about class their motley crew you know Molly Ravel the same kind of things that we may hear even today it is a where when you talk about which we don't really talk that much about we've talked about racism we also have to talk about class and the fact that these systems wouldn't it is this if it does if a system doesn't dominate the psychic over people and it's easy to dismiss the homeless or the individual who seems like he's not really pulling his weight for a system so I saw all of that within John Adams short statement and it goes right up to today and and Eve I want to come to this line that's in the middle of your poem that just stops me cold every time I read it and I suspect there are some people in the audience tonight who we're hearing the poem for the first time and maybe had the same experiences when you are imagining Phyllis Wheatley writing if I know of Ovid may I keep my children it's just devastating line and it feels to me like in the way it's the sort of heart of the poem can you talk about that line and and and what it what it means to you and where its power comes from how it relates to her story sure thank you for that I think that there's the presumption throughout American history that continues into the present that if black people perform enough humanity in a forceful enough way appealing to logic that we can somehow win acceptance or be proven human or earn the rights to move live and breathe like human beings and the system of white supremacy built upon the edifice of chattel slavery in the genocide of indigenous peoples with which Nicole started us talking about is based on the fundamental presumption that black people are not human beings that is an ideology that was a necessary precondition for slavery and it's an ideology that I believe to the core of my heart persists in the United States today in a variety of nefarious forms from our educational system to our prison system to our housing system to transportation inequality to medical schools where people still think that black people have a higher pain tolerance to you know the black women dying in childbirth etc etc etc all of these things are predicated upon a very basic idea that we're not humans and if you are dealing with people that don't believe that that's not a logical thing and therefore it can't be overcome by logic and so the tragedy for me of someone who was clearly so exceptional in such a miraculous person nevertheless dying a very you know after she she became a free woman Phyllis Wheatley became a free woman she was freed by the people who owned her and then when they died she didn't really have any protectors and no one to kind of sell her books she was married to a free black man who wasn't able to find work so she ended up being a scullery maid which is kind of like the lowest ranked person in and has a household labor and all of her children died and eventually she and her her last child died and so her exceptionalism her magical wit her poetry wasn't enough to save her from that kind of ignoble death and that's because the people around her didn't think she was a human person and there was nothing she could do to prove that I am I want to I want to give you a chance to to come into this and ask you about the language so there's an interesting part in your in your poem where you say many once knew another Shore an ocean away whose language songs stories were outlawed on plantation ground in swamp land they raised flags of their native tongues and the the language in the poem itself is just so so great and so in Cantore and it's you know some and so much power but it seems like you're also writing about the exercise of language and there the the use of these people of language and I wonder if you can talk about how first of all what the history is there as far as the way people were using these people that you're writing about we're using their own native tongues but also what that meant to you as a poet well specifically it's about prohibiting the enslaved to speak their native language for fear that they might foment some type of revolt against the plantation owners so you can't speak the language that you were raised with on the on the continent you have to speak English and and and it raises a question about well what happened with those languages how many how much of those how much of those languages were retained and we can actually when we look at Gigi and Gullah culture right we can see retentions of those of those African isms you know today but I'm I'm also imagining the idea of not being able to speak your own tongue under pain of death or whipping or whatever and then escaping and being in a place where you can anoint the land with your own language and the sound of your own music and the sound of your own drums which were also prohibited and being able to celebrate your humanity through the language that you were born into and and imagining that kind of freedom and I and I think you know I still have to reflect on the idea right now that this craft that we are that we are we're exercising today I still marvel at the fact that you know this is not something my great grandfather would have been able to do and I imagine what was the first poetry workshop hmm no learning the letters of the alphabet and learning about learning the sound of how the sound of one names looks in script right and renaming one's own self right and reclaiming oneself through manipulation of this language that way that we have been forced in born into so all of that is what's going through my mind when I'm reading those lines I don't have time for too much more but I do want to ask since you brought up the imagination in kind of you were trying to imagine your way into what it would have been like I wonder if you guys could talk about so this is a historical project the 16:19 project it's a the the purpose of this whole project is history and and it's also explicitly revisionist in its in its tendency we're trying to you know express some things that we feel like people don't understand about American history and I want all of you in your own work have have over many years felt drawn to history have written whole books about historical periods I wonder if you can talk to us about what it is that you think poetry has to offer to this kind of a project and what it is that you think the imagination of these worlds of the past how that can help us here in the present understand the past more deeply I would love to hear from each of you on that we were just talking about this before we came in and I think that you know we've written another genre as I'm you know right in many genres but I think that we live in a time where information is more accessible than ever before but I think poetry can play a unique role in provoking people to go out and learn things so I hope everybody tonight is going to go learn things they didn't know about Crispus Attucks and black seminoles and Phyllis Wheatley and that information is always available and I mean there's been incredible scholarship on all of these topics but what poetry can do is invite people in in a different way and also provoke a moment of empathy and imagination and I hope that all of our poems I think that all of these poems are asking people to be in a moment you know for me beginning in the moment of understanding that we don't know where Phyllis Wheatley is even buried so me having to imagine what it would be like to visit her grave right is something that is only possible through the the speculative space of a poem but I think that that's something poetry can do that's really special I have to admit that I've been writing on this for a very long time to the extent that an excavation of history is in the project ever so I do not call the Wish Bone trilogy and what it involved going all the way back really to 1607 talking about indentured servants which is the long we could say before slavery was introduced to to Virginia which was I think 1641 when blacks were actually identified as slaves in Virginia before that of course blacks have been identified as property in all places of all places we think of boss we usually don't think we think about the south we don't think about the north but the north that's where it really begins I mean I also think about the fact that here and New York City if it would almost happen if you up city had seceded and join the South because of cotton it's all about economics and the founder of analysis I would just say you were talking about the statue - uh what Confederate General was that down as Charlotte's saw this will someone knows and we were thinking about how it was blacked out with garbage bags pooping so became a negative image and the question about you know we're talking about we're at a time where we're we're really a ting we're constantly evaluating America's history and these poems that we bring into the world are part of that reevaluation I can't I don't have the skills to build a statue but I do have the steps and skills to put on paper the history yeah in new ways to fascinate people and bring people into a story that is their own story and that they can use them to to see a different understanding of their possible futures I want to just thank you three so much it has been such an honor and and I would just say to all of you you know it always helps to read a poem after you hear it a second third fourth time so make sure you check out there are three poems as well as all the other creative works in the issue in the magazine on your way out thank you again very much [Applause] [Applause] so I juked alia that I was going to sit down and sing an original song but I can't play the piano nor can I sing so the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to hear from some of the writers who wrote some of the essays in the magazine when I first pitched this idea to Jake in my editor Elena I said that I thought that slavery that nothing about modern American society has been left untouched by this legacy that it is often rendered invisible but that if you look at almost anything in American life you can actually explain why things are in this country by going back to slavery and often the anti black racism that developed to support it so when you read the magazine you'll see that each of the pieces starts with a modern phenomenon and then it explains it to you and traces the roots back the very rigorous reporting so we have stories about democracy we have stories about sugar why Americans consume more sugar than any other Western country we have stories about traffic jams and how those relate to our desire to segregate people we have a story about violence in the criminal justice system about geography about capitalism itself so I think when you go through the magazine you will really see what I see every day which is that the legacy is part of everything in our society and it doesn't only impact black Americans it actually impacts all of us who are on there ken's and many of us in other countries as well so tonight we're going to talk to three of the writers who worked on various pieces for this project we're going to talk to Jamelle Bouie who is a columnist for The New York Times we're gonna talk to buz Lee Morris who is a contributor or excuse me a staff writer for the magazine my very dear friend as am I supposed to be I'm probably am I supposed to be walking over there your show you just do what you want we're gonna be talking to Wesley Morris who is a staff writer at the magazine and we're gonna be talking to Linda via Rosa who's a contributing writer to the magazine and I think I was supposed to move over here so how awkwardly come over now [Applause] hey guys well I'm Nicole I have to say some of you were easier to convince to work on this than others I won't call anyone out well he wouldn't even answer my texts listen I'm bad at answering text messages from everyone so don't take it personally but what I was asking you guys to do is not easy and I understood that and also you know you guys are working on lots of other things as well but I think all three of your essays are very powerful and I'm excited to talk to you about them tonight so I'm going to start with you Jamel your essay is about our modern political system and I imagine many of us are trying to grapple with where we are in America and of course that the black folks were like you know telling white people welcome to the America we've been living in for a long time but what I really love your essay and it really helps us explain how we got here and I'd love for you to talk to us a little bit about it right now sure I'm so a couple of politics most of the time and the thing I asked about the thing I should have honed in on was obstruction America American politics right now and for the last ten years has been defined by sort of a hyper obstructionism and there are some obvious links to slavery you can look to the electoral college you can look to the Senate even institutions that in the antebellum period empowered slave owners and kind of created a culture and an obstructionist culture that could manifest itself at times but I wanted to go a little deeper than that and think about sort of the ideological basis of the obstructionism we've been saying for the last ten years because it's distinct it isn't just we want to stomp the other side from doing stuff it involves arguments about the legitimacy of the other side it involves claims about the legitimacy of national majorities that most Americans might want this thing but because that majority doesn't consist of the right kind of people it's not a legitimate majority and you see that kind of thinking that kind of sort of obstructionist opposition to majority is this belief that if that that small distinct minority is have not just a right to input and a right to shape the final outcome but a right to veto outcomes a baby I think they don't agree with that that's a product of slavery that's a product of sort of the political culture of slaveholders in the antebellum United States and so the guy I spend a lot of time on is John C Calhoun who was a terrifying man as you can see he looks not well there's poisoned by racism for your skin in so many ways and they're not a great not a great skin care regime going on there but Calhoun is interesting because he is sort of an intellectual he's a planter intellectual and he helps to leave the South in developing kind of an anti majoritarian ideology in position against the north against sort of mounting anti-slavery sentiment and what I find so interesting about Calhoun is that his theories of concurrent majority meaning that for a proper majority the way it works is that every single constituent part signs off on it and if that doesn't happen in the Constituent Park and say No Deal nothing's going to happen this this kind of approach to politics this very reactionary anti majoritarian approach it basically and it based but it sort of drives the energy towards the civil war right it is secession happens in part because the South is convinced that unless it can control the federal government entirety in its entirety cannot protect slavery and after the war this way of thinking doesn't actually die off it kind of just persist and even it becomes attenuated from slavery it still becomes a part of American reactionary politics of racially reactionary politics and I think you can make a pretty good case that in the present today the efforts to restrict the electorate to just white people the efforts to reshape and restructure American democracy to favor low populated small rural areas the whole census question thing that we that happened the past couple months that reflects Calhoun's influence in American politics and so in this subtle but very important way Calhoun and kind of the intellectual movement he inspired I think his rule so is shaping the structures of American politics today and shaping and it has influenced the obstruction and the sort of reactionary energy that I think we've experienced in American politics the last decade thank you so Linda in a magazine full of essays that were very hard to read yours was amongst the most difficult and I mean that because your your article is about the torture of enslaved people ostensibly to advance science and I would love for you to share some of your essay with us today I want to start by saying I was not one of the people you had to try very hard I was grateful she's ready so thank you thank you or both of your s I mean the way you do it it makes it seem like people had to do the math now to figure out which everything just a little bit so you know it was everyone on the stage except you [Laughter] so my essay looks at discrimination in our current health care system and traces it back to slavery and the discrimination I saw firsthand when reporting on infant maternal mortality firsthand reporting on hiv/aids in the south and firsthand when my own father was treated really poorly by the medical system so my story begins with John Brown and John Brown was an enslaved man there we go on plantation in Georgia in the 20s 1820s 30s and 40s and he was fortunate enough to escape and write a book so reading his story was really compelling because he told it in his own words and in his own voice so he was loaned to another enslaver who was a medical doctor and so that doctor was trying to find a cure for sunstroke so he took John Brown put him in a pit of hot coals it reached a hundred degrees and basically tortured him and had you know only his head was out so he fed him different rent remedies until he passed out and then he did it again and again and he created this bogus Sun stroke remedy so then next dr. Hamilton was trying to prove his obsession with black skin being thicker than white skin so he burned John Brown until he would he was scarred and he was in so much pain that he couldn't no longer work in the fields which he was still doing during this experimentation so this was really hard to deal with it was really hard to you know read and absorb and there were a lot of examples of this but because you two hogs so much space with your essays on politics music keep it coming Linda I limited to the medical myths I was looking at two two and one was the idea that blacks have extremely high pain tolerance and a kind of superpower against pain and the second one was that we have diminished lung capacity that was actually helped by working in the fields so I know so the first the idea about the diminished lung capacity really came from Thomas Jefferson and so he wasn't a medical doctor but he was widely respected and so in 1787 he wrote this long piece called notes on the state of Virginia about a lot of different things but almost as a kind of throw away he mentioned this idea about diminished lung capacity in black enslaved people and right away medical doctors and scientists jumped on that in the south because they were looking for a way to legitimize both enslaving people but also taking a step further to say no this is really good being out in the Sun and working hard will really build up the lungs I know and no one embraced it with more vigor than Samuel Cartwright who was a physician in Louisiana he was in New Orleans and so he his idea so he had a very long study that he presented at a medical conference and it was also reprinted in a scholarly journal that talked about all the ways blacks are different from whites including the diminished lung capacity and then he went this sort of bizarre step further and talked about a disease called Drake domain eeeyah so drape de mania was what happened to black people that made them escape slavery and so the cure for it not surprisingly is working them harder and beating them harder so I'm reading this and I'm thinking what a nutjob this guy is and he's crazy and this is crackpot stuff but it was in legitimate medical journals it was presented at chuckle conferences it was picked up and legitimized so even this guy Cartwright's theories still are present in today's medical practice there's he used as an instrument called a spirometer which measures lung capacity so he built in measurements in the machine about race so it was a race correction that said black people have diminished lung capacity so that machine is still used today and it still has the race correction of ten to fifteen percent so it looks at black lung inferiority and I had bronchitis a few years ago and I had to breathe into a spirometer to test my own lung function and I thought huh I wonder I thought now I wonder if my doctor put my race in to calibrate it you know - so it can measure that difference and then finally the last part of this these old theories that are really myths that have stuck around is the idea of high pain tolerance in blacks and so in 2016 that's only three years ago there was a study of 200 medical students and residents and it asked them to sort of talk about pain perceived pain of their patients and it was very specific it was like if your hand gets slammed in the door of a car or if you break a bone what is the perceived pain that you experience and the medical residents and students and residents mainly the white ones perceived that black people were less sensitive to pain and had a higher pain tolerance and then really the worst part of this was they also believed the lie the false assumption that Thomas Hamilton tortured John Brown to prove and that is that black skin is thicker than white skin so when you think about I mean it's you know I heard some people chuckling and some of us because it does seem bizarre but the consequences are real and the consequences of black people not being prescribed pain medicine when they are in excruciating pain not being given follow-up exams because there's a belief that we don't need them it's deadly you look at life expectancy you look at as you right around maternal mortality which regardless of income or whether black women are insured still shows up they are very devastating and deadly consequences and that science was used to justify the torture that was required to enslave people and force them to work and so I think what your piece does very powerfully is show how we think we're smarter now we think that's bizarre and yet we still have those same notions they don't simply go away because the institutional slavery nobody's getting a wedding thank you for that and now Wesley yes so it was really important for me one Wesley is a brilliant writer a very dear friend of mine makes me think about music and culture and in ways that I don't I'm not very sophisticated about those things and it was really important that everything in this magazine not be about how poorly we have been treated and that some things in this magazine also needed to tell the story of our contributions and what we have created in the most horrific circumstances and that's why I really wanted you to write about music but also understanding that no one's really surprised that black people have made musical contributions so how could we tell this story in a way that digs a little bit deeper than that and you've really created just a profoundly beautiful and funny as usual in some ways essay that talks about you know when we talk about black people we always have to put that - in but the truth is American black music is American music and that's really what your essay is arguing yes it's complicated there I mean part of the reason I gave Nicole the runaround was because she wanted me to in 4,500 words tell the story of American music for this issue I acted like an editor sorry and I guess the question was was how do you how do you satisfy Nicole's entirely necessary tonal question while also acknowledging this very real reality that American music didn't black American music didn't start in America necessarily with black people mm-hmm where it started was with a white guy who the myth goes happened upon an old black man who was grooming a horse on a on a on land owned by a gentleman whose last name was crow and during this happening this sort of magical occurrence in which this white man his name was Thomas Dartmouth rice known eventually throughout the world is TD rice he sees this black man and the black man is grooming the horse humming a tune his hands are palsy it in some way so goes the story and he's grooming the horse in a way that is just strange but also apparently captivating - Thomas Dartmouth rice who was an actor by the way an actor who I would argue is looking for something to distinguish himself from all the other actors who were in these troops performing in shows and he sees this man grooming this horse and a light bulb goes off and he thinks up okay this is a great tune these movements are so strange and it couldn't have just been that the tune was interesting and the movements were strange it had to have also been the combination of those two things in tandem with this man's position and also this man's position as a black person so he has this inspiration to and this is a fairly human inspiration right like if you watch YouTube is full of a moment like this where you see something and you just your automatic response that if it's great or even if it's awful but mostly it was great is to is to duplicate it in some way so he takes this moment horns do a theater I'm a bridging and rather than take the tune and the movements and just go onstage and do those he kind of has to signal to the audience that he is not himself and it is giving a performance and the only way he can think to do that now he's not the first person to do this but the natural conclusion you draw if you want to get it the very similar to dove the thing you've just seen in this on this property is to I don't know black in your face so he burned some cork into a liquid form lets it cool probably uses a cloth or something to put it on his face but applies it and there's another part of the story where he takes a different black man's clothes puts those on because those are Raggedy or and more indicative of a kind of social station as a black person and goes out on stage in these clothes in this blackface and performs a song that he'd written the lyrics to to the to and that he heard the horse groomer do while he groomed that horse and by the way he didn't catch the man's name we don't know what the man's name is so TD rice of course gives him a name I think I told you earlier that the property that the man was grooming the horse on was owned by a gentleman named white man named crow so he writes a song very eventually the song that would sweep the nation about a old black man jump in Jim Crow and so here you have in this moment the birth of the birth of American racism is a great mascot you have something that most audiences in that moment would never have no audience really whatever it's seen before they've seen men perform in blackface but never with the sort of flair that tdrss he was an actor I don't know what kind of singer he was those stories don't really get it the quality of his voice but he had something he had to see had a star quality and so the place goes nuts it's it's it's the Beatles landing it was it LaGuardia JFK or whatever it's it's a moment like that and American culture is really never the same but from that I mean it's a long story it's a mess I'm telling you the setup we get Jim Crow in this moment we get American popular culture and so before this moment it's all European operas and British theater and nobody liked it they wanted something that was well I didn't they wanted something truly American and this was it so from this moment you have the basis upon which all of the sort of cultural tug-of-war begins about who's really whose stuff is really what and part of that is is a matter of music now I want to sort of fast forward I'm gonna I'm gonna skip I'm gonna skip this guy yeah cuz you've got four minutes but this was interesting because I do think that lil nas ex represents a kind of reverse frontiersman ship this is a song that is ultimately as far as I'm at least concerned whether Billy Ray Cyrus is involved or not I do think his participation is is important but I think the song without Billy Ray Cyrus is really it's a song about a declaration of independence I don't I know he wrote it about dropping out of school and everything but whatever it also to me in his embrace of a western frontier culture also makes him an expansionist in some way and that's I mean it's powerful it's under two minutes it's the song of the year but what I really what really to me is the the thing that I was most excited to write about and and I and I did this for you Nicole because I couldn't I was looking for it I wanted to try to find something that like spoke to the thing that I think you made me want to do and that I also believed in in terms of what this project was sort of morally responsible do was to UM was to find something that was obvious in terms of its of its cultural importance but was also entirely black in in what it was and the thing that sort of I think is the greatest advertisement for black people black culture all that we can do and are and can be that also isn't announcing itself in such an obvious way so for all the people on the livestreams right now who are listening you're gonna lose us for a second because we don't have the rights to yes heatwave it's the it's the just go to youtube it's the one with seven million views here we go I don't know that I mean that's just beautiful and part of what's beautiful about it to me is you know this is mode this is the Motown songs Martha and Vidal is and this is made this music is made in the same place that cars were making and it was made with the same sort of ingenuity that Ford auto plants produced automobiles and sorry I don't know it's it is it is the greatest I would say cultural product involving black people almost from top to bottom and in which you have this marriage of Western cultural music and values with with white Western and cultural values and music with black cultural values you have the black church and you have the juke joint and you have classical music happening all at the same time you hear tubas and tambourines and strings and these black women singing about having a crush on a guy and you know it's just it's anti minstrel see in so many ways but you know it and we talk about it in terms of like we think about Motown now is very square right and this is the most respectable presentation and that's sort of the most stodgy presentation of blackness but I don't know I mean if you think about a hundred years of how stupid and inadequate and subhuman and every like in unworthy of the vote and in pent Lake you know impervious to pain this is the number one thing you can do to combat that and they sold a lot of money and made a lot of people rich and famous and a lot of people real proud of themselves so thanks sorry Nicole no you actually ended right on time well we did we didn't talk for a second because we didn't I'm sorry I went long but you didn't you didn't go long you a mindful no I I do but I'm also mindful of everyone's time and we're getting ready to open up for Q&A so I do want to just say for all of us this was writing was very emotionally taxing several of us have cried during the writing of this and I just think we all realize that the wounds are still so fresh even though we like to believe that there's a great deal of distance so I just appreciate your vulnerability both in the writing and on stage tonight and I think all of you for taking part in the issue could we give them all [Applause] so according to my script says lights down on the panelists and Jayco at the podium am i doing something wrong I'm gonna go get my stool are you just gonna walk off no good we're just we're just going off script now here I brought you this oh I don't need this many thank you okay well I'm just gonna ask them I'm gonna ask some questions yeah while we're doing this or no no move on well just let's bring out everybody because they're all got come out now everybody's coming out now so that you can ask them questions we are gonna have some questions when the questions are over we're gonna have a special special surprise at the end of the evening so make sure that you stick around through it as we're bringing everybody out and getting seated I also want to just take a moment for some thank yous as you're probably beginning to gather this is an enormous project and it took a great deal of work from a great many people to pull it off so we want to recognize some of them my name first of all I want to thank AG soles burger our publisher Dean Beck a our executive editor and marrieth Meredith Le'Veon our executive vice president and chief operating officer for their unflagging support of this project and for the vision and leadership that have helped it expand into something really big hold your applause please to the end because I have a bunch of people thank you also to the team at the Smithsonian's National Museum of african-american history and culture especially Mary Elliott where's Mary Laura pacer and julissa Marinko thank you to John Sawyer and Mark Schulte at the Pulitzer Center we'll hear more about what they've done and it's just a second and to the magazine staff a big special thank you to Elena Silverman Caitlin Roper Gail Bickler Kathy Ryan Jessica demson Ben Graham Jeanette Deb Bishop Claire Gutierrez Jasmine Hughes Jeannie choy Jessica lastic Bill Wasik Erika summer Molly Bennett david Karthus Claudia Rabine Nicole Philip Maggie kiss lick Kiana Williamson Alex force Tenzer Blake Wilson and Kate LaRue that is only a partial list if I were to name everybody who worked on this project we would be here all night so I want to thank so many of these people they have all touched this project given deeply of themselves and we're very grateful to you and now we're going to take some questions from all of you okay so we have microphones down here if you're here in the hall you can come down to the microphones and just go ahead and ask your questions we also have I've been told we have 275 questions piling up the people who are watching on the livestream so if you're watching on livestream we're not going to answer all your questions I apologize yes ma'am yes this is extraordinary york times how are you going to use this profound amount of information that you have to inform your contemporary coverage [Applause] well it's a great question the project is gonna be going on for the next couple of months and as I said at the outset we will be publishing more stories that are kind of under this umbrella of the 16:19 project throughout the paper elsewhere in the magazine and you know those are a start for what you're talking about but I think also this whole project is a way of trying to open up a conversation about how all the stuff we've been talking about tonight and obviously that's just a sample of what's in the magazine still inform so much of contemporary American life so you know I think this project itself is a start thank you can yeah I can I just I mean just to sort of follow up on that though I mean the idea that this is happening in this newspaper right now is I mean we're okay I do think that I mean there is a scenario in which somebody tells Nicole no and that this is not something that they need to or they're like well if this is how you feel Miss Hannah Jones why don't you just write a story and leave it at that I think that I mean I don't mean it just does not I'm not addressing the the nature of your question but what I'm saying is there is room in this newspaper to achieve things like this - well yeah and I mean I just would say also when I was just giving some thank yous I mentioned the leadership at the newspaper this project is pretty much the biggest thing we've ever done you know it's not just a special issue of the magazine it's a special section of the newspaper a multi-part podcast a whole educational outreach program which we'll talk about in a moment other stories throughout the organization this event more events and it is that size and that scope and that kind of focus and attention in part because folks like HG Salzburg are a publisher and Dean Beck a our executive editor and our our business leadership all immediately saw when Nicole first brought this idea how important it was and how important it was to kind of put all the resources of the organization behind it so you know I do think that the Wesley has a good point there can I add something yes please I'm with the Smithsonian I'm not on this staff obviously with the New York Times but in doing this project the staff from the editors to you know designers and others said that they had an education in putting together this piece and so the word I would use this transformative and you need to read between the lines because you might see that perhaps when they approach designing something that speaks to the black experience in America you might see something with a more sensitive touch or you might find that the words that are used are words that have more of a notion of I need to think about this a little bit differently about how I write about this and so I think that's important because there is that learning curve and there are some things that people learned over this process and so that's very important to share yes sir I really a two-part question really the first part is pertaining to what was your biggest challenge internally not just with yourselves but here and coming up with these stories and writing them and committing yourselves to and my second part of that question is for the people that we're not involved but this relates to and reflects how do you how do you plan to in your I guess I'm I guess how do you plan to inform them as well to keep them to say you know this is totally like this is your struggle this is your story too you may be on the business side or you may be intact but this as much as you're struggling story as everyone else and no you were not a part of it and putting this all together like how can you I guess what would you do it and speaking to them what would you say to them to let notice they could spread it to their teams internally I'll take the first part is so I was writing about something really traumatic and torture and suffering and it was really hard and I started to numb out a little bit just to so I could soldier on and then this weird thing happened I was finishing my essay about all these terrible things and cotton um and I was frying fish alright frying fish for dinner and I splattered grease on my arm so I got a big bandage on my arm that you can't see and I got a second-degree burn and I was like I have low pain tolerance okay it hurt so much and I thought oh my god this was nothing compared to what John Brown had to endure and I realized stop numbing out him you know like put this in this essay put the pain and anger in write it in I'll answer the second question as a way of also addressing the previous question I think that I applaud everyone at the times in the tremendous team that it took to pull off something so monumental and particularly I think we should give another round of applause that's the loving part the critique part is that it's really I'm not going to say easy but comparatively easy to look back at 400 years and to document all the things that felt backwards that felt unscientific that felt bizarre and crackpot that felt inhumane and the lesson from that analysis is not how terrible we've always been but the lesson is how easy it is to uphold great cruelty as the status quo and to uphold basic dehumanization as the bedrock of the society in which we move and live because all of the people we've talked about all of the errors in which they lived were normal to them all of the systems that we're condemning now were normal to them and so the call becomes not looking backwards but also in the tradition of Sankofa looking forwards and and therefore you know my loving ask of the times and of any of the other institutions that you're talking about is thinking about how are we replicating these dehumanizing narratives every single day how are you in fact at risk of undermining this kind of great work if it's it's in parallel to rhetoric that continues to demonize as you humanize black people black trans people black undocumented people black disabled people black queer people black people with HIV black poor people and so on and so forth and that's the kind of questioning that we have to take into all of these institutions it's not just learning in terms of like learning lots of facts but learning modes of questioning that we need to be constantly interrogating in a time where we're facing the rise of authoritarianism which rests upon regular people doing nothing and asking nothing we have any more questions anyone have a question yeah please come down to the microphone so we can hear you hello hi so my name is Sona Giada I am a first-generation African American from Senegal so when I heard you say Senegal I kind of clap for myself so I just wanted to hear your thoughts on this like I've heard some folks tell me I am mad at Africans and I am mad at my African ancestors for some of my people to these white folks and enslaving us and forcing us to be here um stop calling me african-american cuz I'm not from Africa I am from America I am a black American not African American and for me that kind of causes a split cuz you know I spent half of my life in Senegal and the other half here so it's kind of like should I call myself a black American or an African American what do you say to these people who want to cut their ties from Africa because they have been here for generations long enough to say I am a black American so hey she is my guest I provided her here she's a great student activist for integration in the city she the activists with a group called teens take charge a hey Marcus very brilliant young lady I appreciate your question and I'm gonna answer that because I think in some ways my assay gets to that I've thought a lot about this myself through the years and part of what my essay is talking about is this peace and respect that comes from not looking for identity elsewhere not feeling as black people that we can't claim our own country not feeling as black people that we can't claim the only country we've ever known yes we are descended from Africa but one cannot call us African people we've never been there we don't speak any of the languages we can't tell you what culture we came from so I think it's ok to acknowledge both of those things to say that this this is our people who we descended from but we are American and I think for you I think that you call yourself what you want to call yourself I think that you choose the identity that you want to choose because one thing that we know about black folks we are very excited we take everybody I know people who literally are not black who we call Rachel Dolezal though we're not claiming her what is complicated right there his histories are complicated who gets to immigrate from Africa to America is complicated what role you people who come from the continent feel they play in a hierarchy in America plays a role as well I think it's very complicated but I think that what we do know is I'm going to die Lee was shot and it didn't matter that he wasn't black American right we know that when people look at a person who was black they treat them like your person who was black and it doesn't matter what their heritage is and in that way we have a common community and I think those are the things that we need to acknowledge thank you for your question I've just a little bit I think because I've seen some of this conversation - especially online this idea that there needs to be some rigid division and I think what's missed in that is that there's this long history of black internationalism parts of African Americans of Africans sort of seeing recognizing the differences recognizing the distinction was also seeing common struggle against racism against white supremacy against what the boys would call global color case and I think that if we're thinking politically at least and and and thinking in those terms it's really important not to throw up these high barriers to recognize that the African Diaspora does have interests in common and cultural differences in differences in how we are experience living in America or living in the UK or living in France shouldn't erase the fact that there are commonalities and connections that are important to identify and maintain and strengthen is one thing to that please and that is that rhetorically I prefer just black prefer the without the hyphen in there because I I'm talking about a pan-african global vision of blackness but I want to say in in the work that I'm interested in with the Florida Seminoles I'm talking about an American polenka a pálinka is a term used in Colombia for us for instance a place like San Basilio they put Lincoln which is us which is a colony of escaped Africans who established their own colony just like they did down in Florida right and there's still there today four hundred years later but what I'm talking about is a commonality of histories of a commonality of histories of of diaspora through enslavement but also seeking freedom right and so let's call it black so we have time for two more questions and Eva I believe you're gonna ask us a question from and then we'll come to you ma'am Evy you're gonna ask us a question from the live stream is that right from some of our hi okay the magazine and I have been supervising the close to 300 questions that we've gotten on the live stream so far and tell them to tweet them all to Nicole watching Nicole's mentions they're there so this is a question that came in from the Asbury Park racial justice project they're having a watch party with close to 120 people and they'd like to know that with all of the major human rights challenges today how did you decide and convince others that this 400th anniversary deserved an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine and how did you keep it on course and avoid shiny object syndrome okay I feel like given a Twitter answer which means well was the question how do you or how did you how did you how did you yes oh did okay never mind take that back that was I don't care how did if surprisingly so I got I've gotten this question a lot and people assume because y'all just heard the critiques of the organization that pays me that it would have been a very hard lift to get this amount of resources dedicated to this and it just wasn't I came in from leave maybe you guys were so glad I actually came back from working I came back from believe and I came in within I think a week of being back and I first talked to my editor Elena and I said I have this idea and I presented it at the ideas meeting and immediately at that meeting Jake said let's do it and I only pitched only I pitched an entire issue of the magazine but all the other pieces that have come with this I didn't even pitch that my vision wasn't even that big so Kaitlin decided that she wanted to do a special section part of the kids section but daily it just kept growing bigger and bigger because I think people understood on the magazine both the power of the moment I mean we can look in our society right now and people are trying to grapple with and understand why and how and history is always instructive but I also just think they believed in what we were trying to do so it really I mean I get y'all know me I I critique everything I could take the times I critique I mean that's all I do on Twitter all day these critique news organizations to critique the way that we fail margins communities all the time but I also think we need to pause and recognize the sheer amount of resources that this organization has put into this it's unprecedented I don't know every time someone says I might get in trouble for saying that you should shut up but I'm just gonna I'm gonna say it anyway you know this wasn't an easy issue to sell as for its slavery right this is I'm serious this is not it's not like you have sponsors knocking down your doors necessarily to put their name on the page when you're talking my slavery there are certain sponsors you can't even take because they participated in slavery this was not an easy thing to do and I remember Jake and I had a conversation and he was like if we don't sell a single ad we'll just run as four HBCUs for free I don't know if he told advertising that [Laughter] but I'm just saying to say that it wasn't a given that this was going to somehow be you know financially viable product it was a product it was it was there was something that we believed in and the organization believed in and put a tremendous amount when you go to your contributors page trust me you've never seen anything is black in the new york times the number of black writers black artists black photographers black poets who had their hands in this issue you just have not seen it and I am extremely aware because I have studied the times I know the vast history of the times in the way that times is written about black folks and I know what this means that in the paper of record when people come back 50 years or 100 years from now and they want to understand our society that they're gonna find this thing so I just I would never say we shouldn't critique any organization and we should and I do and if you you know somebody got access to my phone right now probably get in trouble because I have a lot of bad things to say about things that I don't think are going right but I think we also have to acknowledge how much people cared about this and and what we tried to do here and I decided one it's one last point to make to that that like we do we do a lot of big projects every year we do special issues on a variety of subjects and some of them get pretty big and at the magazine we like to kind of be innovative and do you know crazy projects and all that this project got double triple quadruple the size of anything they've ever done and the reason that it did is not just that there's this is such an important moment and we all recognize it's also all the ways that an institution like the New York Times can in subtle ways and in direct ways and direct ways sort of communicate to the group of people who are working on a project like this that the full support of the institution is behind something but also that that you're kind of given a cue to go bigger and to go bigger and to connect with this person over in that department oh they might be interested in this and that person over in that department might be interesting this this project drew individuals from all over the building people who don't even work directly in the newsroom but who just felt passionate about this there's so many people in the in the times institution that gave above and beyond what they would typically give you know and their normal day's work just because they knew how important this was and you know I see some of them here tonight thank you for all your extra efforts on this I could call you all have a name but again we want to be respectful of people's time but that that is what took this project and grew it to the level that it is and I hope we'll continue to grow it in the next couple of months is all people throughout the organization really participating and now we come to you for our last question so I my question connects to something that you've said a little bit earlier as a person who also gets paid by this lovely institution I spend a lot of time thinking about and the ways in which how we conceptualize what goes on in the world and how we represent what goes on in the world don't always match up like as somebody who's here in the building every day and like sees y'all walking around and and I've been working with Mindy on this 400 years of any quality project and and watching 16:19 sort of like come up almost simultaneously which was really interesting but what are the ways in which we now get to say we have the last 400 years what are we gonna do with the next 400 years right and what are the what are the ways that like we as the paper of record are responsible for contributing to what gets remembered because unfortunately we live in a science in a society where what is written is what is remembered what are the ways that we contribute to that memory what are the ways that we contribute to other people knowing you know if our readers are curious and want to know what are the ways that we inform those folks and draw them in to what's really happening and not this idea that like well they'll figure it out mm-hmm I think one way to do this is through not just looking looking having this issue look back and not just have this issue look at the problems of the present but also look at the resistance to the problems and to lift that up and to hold on to it in my specific essay you know I talk about J Marion Sims the so-called father of modern gynecology who tortured black women black enslaved women to perfect search his surgeries so there was a huge resistance to his statue being in Central Park and now it is not just yeah I was right and so part of the protests which I love was theatrical because women dressed in bloody gowns calling out the names of the three three of the enslaved women who were tortured by him and they were an ARCA Lucy and Betsy and now that statue is gone and it was across from the New York Academy of Medicine which made it even worse and now it's moved and that is some you know that's just one example in my wheelhouse of the resistance that can really make a difference I just want to say there were two poetry books they're written about the women that that were experimented on by Mary J Marion Sims and a play yeah and but I also want to take this and say that outside of the realm of the of the New York Times a little chiselers on paper who is carving out our our homes and our stories there's so much history that has not been told yet it's just laying out there in in these in the history books that has yet to be brought into the public imagination through our work I think Toni Morrison said one one thing she said and I'm gonna I'm gonna roughly quote her here but she said yes the world has revealed to us as we step into the future but at the same time the past is also revealed to us as we uncover more and more and more about the past that preceded us that informs our future and we have the opportunity to to explore these amazing life-giving challenging stories that affirm our humanity as black people and I just want to encourage anybody out there with a pencil opinion anybody black out there research your history and bring it to the page you need to wrap up there because if you have a special surprise that's going to kind of end the evening so we do need to wrap up there we could keep going obviously for a lot longer with the questions from the livestream and from all of you but as I said you know we're just beginning the 16:19 project tonight if you have more questions please send them in you'll be able to see in the packet with the the magazine in the special section that you pick up on your way out there's some information there about where you can send questions that you have how you can tweet at us etcetera so I want to just take a moment to thank all of you who have been here tonight all our panelists okay so as we exit the stage and kind of change the change the the the setup here and Nicole and I just have a few last things we want to say as our panelists legs of the stage and in a way this this kind of relates to that last question when we think about how where this project sort of goes from here and how we take some of the thinking that has come up tonight and that comes up in this issue and move it forward we're if you have been inspired by any of what you've read here to never heard here tonight or what you're going to read in the issue we want you to join us in in this work especially those of you who are involved in education or who work with young people that's that's a really important way to move this project forward as we said earlier those copies of the magazine out there and in them you'll see a sheet about our curricular project with the Pulitzer Center this is going to be a free curriculum that's available for high school and college age students that turns everything that we have in the issue into a curriculum that can be taught in classes you can get information about that if your kid is in school and you want them to be learning this if you're an educator and you want to bring it into your school if you're involved in working with young people there's just really great educational materials and we're very much looking forward to seeing what young people do with this this the 16:19 project and how they can be the ones to move it forward you have anything you want to add to that yeah I just I just want to thank you all again for coming it means the world to me personally and I hope that you will really sit with what we've produced it's not perfect there will certainly be stories that you wish you would have seen or things that you'll critique and we're fine with that but I hope you will take it as a whole and understand what we're trying to do in this 400th year because we cannot change the society if we don't acknowledge how we got here so again I thank you all for coming and we are now you've waited till the end so we have a very special treat for you or a little reward for sitting through what has been a long program we know and that is by Higginson Singh Harlem choir please help me welcome there [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] when yes rewards in each Oh press so hard they could not [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh boy they could not stay [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] then go people go [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] yeah [Music] [Applause]