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Editor’s Note by Jake Silverstein

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It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew

country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its eco-

can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, nomic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and

we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its

f July, is wrong, and that the
unanimously celebrated every Fourth o astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the exam-

country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions ple it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang,

first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that

date has been lost to history (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted

that was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as

Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival our founders formally declared independence from Britain.

f chattel slavery that would last for
inaugurated a barbaric system o The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New

the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to
original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin. reframe American history by considering what it would mean to

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