To summarize the entire history of African Americans – and African American slavery – in North America (and the United States in particular) would be exceedingly difficult. The 1619 Project attempts to do just that through essays, poems, short fiction, and a photo essay.
One essay, for example, tells the story of the first Africans who arrived in Colonial America. That ship, as the project’s title suggests, arrives in August of 1619. It carried 20 or 30 people who had been imprisoned during the African-Portuguese war. People who had no reason to be in the New World; people who would’ve certainly rather been with their families. Like many other stories, this essay details the poor treatment and injustices African people had to endure at the hands of evil people and profiteers.
Another – a photo essay entitled “They Sold Human Beings Here” – details the sites at which enslaved African were sold. Sites which, incidentally, are mostly forgotten and barely commemorated.
Regardless the essay or poem or short fiction in the project, each piece included in The 1619 Project tells the story of Africans who were enslaved and unceremoniously and terribly sold off to slavers. It also illuminates how slavery and its legacy affected the United States in its past and during its present.
