Black History Month: Nikole Hannah Jones

This year for #BlackHistoryMonth I’m going to celebrate a different person each day. Sometimes they will be people that most of us have heard of, sometimes they may be people very few of us have heard of. Each have created or achieved something that taught me, moved me, changed me, filled me.

On this penultimate day of Black History Month, let’s celebrate someone who delved into history, tried to bring it to life and tease out more accurate and appropriate interpretations of it, and paid a price in backlash and concern trolling for her trouble.

N Hannah Jones is the NY Times force behind their recent 1619 Project, which, upon the sordid 400th anniversary of slavery in this country, sought to create a new understanding of just how long the history of slavery goes back, and just how much impact the long arm of that history has on the Black community today.

She told stories, in print and in podcast that illuminated the original sin, and the fallout from it that stretches over centuries.

She dared to cover slavery from the point of view of the African American experience of America today, and to some people that’s unforgivable.

There are so many examples of how bias lives on today in these reactions.