April 5, 2022 • 42 mins
Glory talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones about her writing process and her preparation for publishing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. In this episode, they also talk about how social justice showed up in Hannah-Jones’ childhood and her exciting journey to finally being a part of Howard University.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin Before we get started, let's talk about Pushkin Plus.
Pushkin Plus is a subscription podcast program available on Apple Podcasts.
Members will get access to exclusive bonus content like my
(00:38):
weekly Bookmarks, where I talk about how I got a
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You'll get uninterrupted listening to many of your favorite podcasts
like Revisionist History, Cautionary Tales, and The Happiness Lab. Sign
up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple
Podcasts or at Pushkin dot m. When The New York
(01:05):
Times magazine journalist Nicole Hannah Jones started work on the
sixty nineteen project in twenty nineteen, she realized it was
a project she had actually been working towards all of
her life. I don't do work for a claim. I
don't do work because I'm trying to get somewhere in life.
I do the work because it's the work that I'm
(01:25):
called to do. In high school, she learned about the
significance of the year sixteen nineteen to African Americans, and
it stuck with her. Sixteen nineteen marked the beginning of
slavery in America as a nation, and four hundred years later,
Nicole's on a mission to make sure everybody knows about this.
I know to whom I belong, I know what this
(01:48):
work means to the people that I wrote it for,
and I know that this work is right. I know
that we are deserving of having our story told this way.
America would not exist without us, It just wouldn't. Nicole
is right. We do deserve to have our story told
and told with respect. That's why in twenty twenty one,
(02:11):
she published the sixteen nineteen Project, A New Origin Story.
It's an anthology of essays, fiction and poetry by known
Black authors, historians, poets, and artists. Welcome to Well Read
(02:39):
Black Girl, the literary kickback you didn't even know you needed.
I'm your host, Glory Adam, and this week I'm speaking
with Nicole Hannah Jones. We talk about how social justice
showed up in her childhood, her writing process as a journalist,
and why she can finally claim Howard University as her own.
(03:07):
Hey girl, how's it going. How are you feeling today? Hey?
I'm doing great and thank you for having me on.
I'm looking forward to the discussion. So, first question, how
did reading and writing show up in your childhood? Oh? Man,
I cannot remember a time where I was not both
an avid reader and a writer. Some of my earliest
(03:29):
memories are reading the newspaper with my dad. I was
always surrounded by books. I was always going to the
library as soon as I got old enough to go
by myself. I would just walk. I always have my
nose in a book, whether we were in a car
or I was sitting in the living room while my
family was watching television. I just always loved books, and
(03:50):
I always used writing to express myself. I kept a
journal from a young age, and then I would write poetry.
I would write short stories that I had in my head.
So I always feel like those two things go together.
I love reading the acknowledgement of folks after you write
a book. But one thing that stood out with your acknowledgements,
(04:11):
there is a person, mister ray Dial, that you shout
out and you give so much love. Can you tell
me about him and how he influenced you? Absolutely? Mister
ray Dial was my African American Studies teacher, and he
was the only black male teacher I ever had. And
I took this one semester Black Studies Elective, and I say,
(04:34):
I mean truly that class I was transformative for me.
Not only was mister Dial just an amazing teacher, he
was funny, he was warm, he was teaching that class
like it was college level because he had taught at
the college level before. He was asked to come to
work in my school district, and he was brought there
specifically because I was at a white high school where
(04:57):
most of the black kids were bust in and there
were just a lot of racial issues at the high school,
and so they recruited him to come help deal with that.
And the way when you say racial issues habin at
your high school, like what exactly did your experience? So again,
our high school was the white high school, and we
were busting as part of a voluntary school desegregation program.
(05:18):
So nearly all of the black kids in the high school,
we were about twenty percent of the population, were busted
in every day from the east side of town, which
was where all the black people lived, into a high
school that wasn't ours. And every day students and teachers
made us aware that the school wasn't ours. So there
were racial fights, we had protests, I led school walkouts.
(05:40):
There was just a lot of racial tension, and there
was a pretty deep racial divide in the school. I
was one of the only black kids in my higher
academic courses. All of the other black kids were in
what was considered the general ed and lower academic courses,
and there were just tensions in the cafeteria, there were
tensions after school. It was a fraught time, and mister
(06:02):
Dial was recruited. I'm not sure if he was recruited
to help keep black students in line, but what they
ended up getting was a teacher who was helping turn
us into little mini revolutionary. So my best girlfriend from
high school we founded an underground student newspaper in opposition
to our white school newspaper. Oh wait, you have to
(06:23):
tell me what was the name of Mister dal could
tell you. He remembers every single thing. I cannot remember
the name of it, but it was something black, I
know that. And he would sneak and let us into
the teacher's lounge to print our newspaper. Yeah, and he
would advise us, right, okay, you're gonna do this, walk out.
This is what you need to do so you don't
get expelled. He was that kind of teacher where he
(06:46):
believed in our right to assert ourselves. He understood our struggles,
and he was trying to guide us so that we
could both protest what we thought was wrong about the school,
but do it in a way that they weren't going
to be able to rob us of our education. And
he was just amazing. He is the epitome of that
educator that changes your life. And to this day, I
(07:07):
still talked to mister dal When I did the book
launch or the sixteen nineteen project in my hometown, I
called mister Dow and I was like, you have to
be on stage with me. And so my final project
in his class, he said to me he still had it.
I graduated in nineteen ninety four and he still had
my final project and he actually mailed it to me.
And I was like, mister Dow, how could you even
(07:28):
keep something that that is that old and know where
it is? But he said he just knew, he knew that.
He was like, I didn't keep most kids final project,
but I knew I needed to keep yours, and sixteen
nineteen was in there. And actually I had written a
little piece on the Roan Bennett in my final project,
so it was kind of amazing. I had completely forgotten
about it, but mister dal had not, and to see
(07:49):
that from you starting your own underground newspaper to like
leading protests with the support of mister Dial when you
got bust back to your house, what was mister Hannah saying, Like,
what was your father thinking? Was he in support of this?
What was your family's response? Were they in line with
it or did they push for like more respectability politics.
(08:10):
I definitely did not come from a household had engaged
in respectability politics. My family's very very working class. My
dad loved to cuss, love to drink, love to throw
a party, So we were not the type of household
that engaged in that. Now they wanted to make sure
I was going to be successful. I was also raised
in a household where all three of us girls were
(08:31):
told we were going to go to college. They didn't
care what we studied, but we were going to go
to college. So what my parents mainly wanted was to
make sure I wasn't doing anything that was going to
mess me up academically. But they were in support. I mean,
they weren't surprised. Mister Dow gave me kind of the
book knowledge that I needed, but my politics were already there.
(08:52):
I grew up in a social justice household. My mom
was taking us to protests even when I was a child.
My mom was heavy into her labor union. We went
to a social justice Catholic church. Like this was really
just part of who I was as a child. But
this is the danger of an education because I didn't
have the knowledge of black political struggle of black history.
(09:16):
And once I started putting those two things together, I
became an incorrigible student. Let me say that, what were
one or two books that you read that lets you know, like, yes,
was it Boldwin, was it Morrison? Do you have some
authors that come to mind immediately? This is going to
(09:38):
be a very revealing answer because I talked to Tanahazi
a lot about this. I didn't read really any black
literature growing up. I was being exposed to Black historians,
African Origins of Civilization, those type of books, but I
wasn't reading literature. I didn't read Bald until I was
in my thirties. I didn't read Tony Morrison until I
was in my twenties. And I think you can actually
(10:00):
see that in my writing, right, I'm not a super
literary writer because I didn't grow up with that The
only black literature I really read when I was in
high school was Length and Hughes. And that's because at
my high school we had one poem by Length and Hughes,
a Dream Deferred. And then I decided to do my
senior ap project on Length and Hughes, and I went
(10:22):
to the library and checked out all of his short stories,
all of his poetry. And then when I got to college,
I took a class on the Harlem Renaissance, and that's
where I was for the first time exposed to Zoro
Neil Hurston. I took an entire class on Richard Right.
So that was the first time I actually had any
exposure to black literature because I didn't come from a
(10:43):
literary household. I talk about this in the preface for
the book. My mom loved like Daniel Still romance novels,
and my dad loved westerns. I'm so glad you brought
up Length and Hughes because I was surprised by American
Heartbreak sixteen nineteen. So I have read so much Lengths
in Hughes and it's like just one of the core
foundational poets that you read as a black artist, as
a black person, you know, length and Hughes, and everyone
(11:05):
refers to dream Deferred, But I had never read American Heartbreak.
So did you make that correlation early? Is that something
you knew from your studies as a child, or it
was later on that you're like, oh my god, he
was writing about the same thing. This was after the
sixteen nineteen project originally published. So no, and I've read
I mean I've probably read more lengthy hughes than your
average person. I literally read all of his short stories everything.
(11:28):
By the way, short stories are amazing. One of my
favorite books is The Ways of Wife Folks, which I
actually have with me. I carried it with me sometimes
because I just love rereading the short stories. But after
the sixteen nineteen project published, someone on Twitter, I think
it's the Binike Library. I think they might have his
papers shared the poem on Twitter and then someone tagged
me in it, and I was like, oh my god,
(11:49):
my favorite poet was writing about sixteen nineteen. And then
I realized, you know, the more I've done this project,
like doctor King was talking about sixteen nineteen all of
the time, but never in any of the speeches that
I ever read or that they talked about. And you
realized that within certain circles sixteen nineteen, it always stood
(12:10):
in as a starting point as this lineage, but it
had been just largely a race from kind of the
common memory, right, And that's the key word, the common memory.
So now that I've read this book and we've been
having conversations and it's part of the public consciousness, I
see it all the time, and I don't think I
had any awareness previously. And it's especially being a student
(12:32):
at Howard and I feel like I'm a well rounded
black person, like I do all these things. I'm like,
how did we miss us? Because we weren't taught. I
want to know when did you first become aware of
it to be wells? Because you were talking about like
history and all these things you were reading. Was she
part of what you were reading with mister dial and
your household was not much later too? So I have
(12:54):
racked my brain about this, and I feel like I
can't remember when I didn't know her name. I mean,
I have these pictures in my head of Black History
Month and our teachers would put up like five great
Black historical figures and they looked like, you know, those
little Victorian brooches. It would be like a picture like
that up on the wall, and that I'DA. B Wells
was one of those, along with Frederick Douglas, George Washington Carver,
(13:17):
and Harriet Tubman, and they said she was a journalist,
but didn't say what type of journalism she was doing,
what was the subject of her journalism. So I knew
her name, but I really didn't know anything else about
her except that she was an important historical figure. And
then when I was at Notre Dame, I was an
African American studies major, and I was very nerdy, I
still am, and so I would go through the stacks
(13:40):
in the bookstore and see what teachers were assigning in
classes that I wasn't able to take, and then I
would buy those books. And one of the books I
saw was the autobiography that Ida b Wells wrote, and
I was like, hum, I don't really know who she is,
Like I know her name, but I don't really know
who she is. And so I started flipping through it
and I was like, oh my god, this woman wasn't
(14:02):
no joke. And so I bought the autobiography and after
I read that, I was just like, this is my
spiritual godmother, right This is the model of a black
woman coming fully into her power and using her voice
for the benefit of her people, and being fearless and courageous.
So you had this experience with mister Dial. You were
(14:23):
just starting to decide what you wanted to be when
you grew up. Why did you decide to actually become
a journalist? So you know, I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa,
and I always say, there aren't a lot of black
people in Iowa, but there's still enough to segregate us.
So that's why we were part of a bussing program,
and we faced a lot of discrimination in the school
(14:43):
and a lot of stereotypes about the black side of
town being dangerous, about the students who were coming from
the black side of town being dangerous, about us not
being as smart. And to be clear, I said, I
did read newspapers my whole life. I subscribed to Time
magazine starting in the seventh grade. I got my first
letter to the editor published when I was eleven years
old about Jesse Jackson. And I told you I was nerdy.
(15:07):
You know, I was first in the nation primary and
this was teen eighty eight and Jesse Jackson was running
to become president, and he didn't do very well in
the primary. And this tells you how to nerd am.
Because I'm eleven years old, I'm paying attention to the
presidential primary. And I felt he didn't do well because
he was black, at least partly, And so I wrote
a letter to the editor and I just said I
(15:29):
felt like he was a good candidate and we should
have given him a better chance, and that one day
we were going to have a black president, whether we
liked it or not. Eleven eleven Obama, It's going to happen.
And every day after I sent the letter in, I
would rush home from school look in the newspaper to
(15:50):
see how they published it. In one day they did,
and I just remember feeling like, oh, I can see
something I don't like and I can write about it.
And I might not change people's minds, but I can
force people to at least grapple and acknowledge how I
feel about it. So the idea that I might be
a journalist was there for a pretty long time. And
then I only aplied to one college. I only applied
(16:12):
to Notre Dame because I believed I needed to go
to a prestigious college, because I felt as a black girl,
I had to have a certain credential to try to
mitigate racism. And I had to go close to home
because my family was working class. They weren't going to
be able to fly me home. If I wanted to
come home, I had to be within driving distance, and
(16:33):
Notre Dame did not offer journalism. So I studied my
first love. My first love really is history. I studied
history in African American studies and considered maybe getting my
PhD in history and being a historian. But I ultimately
decided that journalism could wed the best of both of
those things. I could be writing about contemporary society. I
(16:54):
could write about inequality today and hopefully try to work
in a way to advance our people. But I could
use history in my writing. And that's when I decided
for sure that I wanted to become a journalist. After
the break, Nicole and I dig deeper into her process
of creating the sixteen nineteen project, her writing practices, and
(17:14):
how she ended up in my alma mater, Howard University.
I'm Glory Adam, and you're listening to well read Black Girl.
I'm joined today by Nicole Hannah Jones pulled to prize
(17:37):
winning journalists and the author of the sixteen nineteen Project.
Can we get in your mind a little bit and
just the process of when you're crafting a story, walkway
through the research process of deciding that this was the
book to write, and how you even approach the editors
(17:59):
at The New York Times. It's very clear that they've
been supportive of you from the beginning. There is so
much what feels just like a collective care when it
comes to publishing this work and making sure that you're
at the forefront and you're able to really curate it
the way you want. Can you talk about the contributors,
even the titles of each chapter? How did this all
(18:19):
come together? Yeah? I feel like in some ways I've
been working towards the sixteen nineteen Project my entire career.
I became a journalist because I wanted to write about
black people, and I wanted to write about racial inequality.
But I wanted to do investigative reporting around racial inequality
because I've always felt that so much reporting around race
(18:40):
is superficial, that it's really just listing everything that black
people suffer from, as if no one or no thing
is causing that suffering, and as someone who studies history
and love's history, I know that history for me explain
the architecture of inequality, and so in journalism you could
do the same thing. And almost everything that I've approached,
(19:02):
as you said, most of my career it was always
how can I help people understand this modern phenomenon by
helping them understand the history and the tensional way that
this inequality was built. How can I tell a narrative
that people actually care about? Right? So it was always
these sorts of things, and the way that I approached
the sixteen nineteen project is the way I approach most things.
(19:24):
Having a history degree, I do an extensive amount of
historical research on anything that I'm working on. I read
often multiple books. I do original archival research depending on
what it is that I'm writing. I talk to historians,
I read sociology. I mean, I basically do a literature review.
(19:45):
I like to see everything that's been written along the
subject and try to figure out what can I offer
that will be surprising. As you know, when it comes
to raise, everyone thinks they know, but they don't really know, right,
And so I think of, like, what are all the
arguments I hear what are the objections? What are the
things that people think that they understand but they really don't,
(20:05):
And then how can I challenge that with the writing?
But I didn't know that who was writing it would
be the ultimate testimony to the resilience of our people
and the resilience of our ancestors, that the descendants had
to be the primary shaper of this kind of collective
reckoning with our country. It's so beautiful to encounter this
(20:28):
work because the list of scholars and writers, you know,
you have everyone from Tracy K. Smith in here to
Lendedge to Dorothy Roberts to Barry Jenkins. I mean you
have goud a ranking. It's just so phenomenal. And each
chapter it's simply one word. So you have a democracy race,
sugar progress, Like every single chapter literally shows how the
(20:52):
legacy of slavery isn't everything we do. It's in the
fabric of our constitution and this idea of a functioning
democracy that is what you are illustrating in this book.
How did you know who to pick from the topic
I gotta have this person. Was it a hard process
and narrat down to the contributors? Yeah, so I fought
(21:12):
really hard for all of the titles to be one word,
because to me, the simplicity of just reading the table
of contents and being like, dang traffic, healthcare, medicine, capitalism, democracy, right,
just that single word really speaks to how foundational the
institutional slavery was, that it has touched all of these institutions,
(21:34):
and mostly for the contributors, I knew who I wanted,
particularly for the essays. When I first pitched the project.
One of the first things I did was I conveyed
this massive brainstorming session with scholars whose work had informed mind,
so economists, historians, sociologists, art historians, and many of them
(21:57):
ended up writing for it. And then it was just
a matter of what is the subject that we feel
needs to be covered, and who do we think is
the best person to write that, And so, you know,
Martha Jones own Citizenship, to me, the most obvious choice
in the world Taya Mouse, who's an Afro Indigenous scholar
at Harvard to write the story on the dispossession of
native land. Khalil Muhammed actually pitched the idea of sugar
(22:24):
at our initial brainstorm. That's not what scholarship. He's known
for but it was a brilliant essay, so it really
was truly collaborative in that way. And then as far
as the literary timeline, which is the short fiction and poetry,
that really was the idea of Jake Silver seeing the
editor in chief. We have been having a discussion about
(22:45):
how much of our history is it told through black
people because we weren't able to read and write as
we were experiencing so much of this, and what if
we had some of the greatest American writers reimagined these moments.
And we just did a massive Excel spreadsheet and we
just listed every black writer that we would love to
see participate. And some are expected, you know, Rita Dove
(23:09):
Post Surprise Winner, and others are not. Terry McMillan, who
he wouldn't think about being in this type of project.
But I'm like, I love Terry McMillan as a writer, right,
and who can't see Mike's president. I saw that she
got Terry McMillan over here. Yeah, Will is like the greatest.
I feel like she's underappreciated, like she's the best at everything,
(23:29):
like exactly she was, so, you know, excited and honored
because this isn't something people would typically think of her.
As you know Barry Jenkins, he's a director and a screenwriter.
But the first time I read his poem it made
me cry. It's haunting and beautiful. Like I said, what
greater testament to what our ancestors bore than to be
(23:49):
able to have some of the greatest writers and historians
in America all in one volume, and almost all of
them are black. Like to me, this is the testimony
and mean takes her breath away just the magnitude of
this project. It just has such like a tenderness to it.
And not only are you thinking about like our ask,
(24:10):
but you are reimagining our future too. There's a poem
on brevity by Camille Dungee, the last Deans of the poem,
it says, revision is a struggle towards truth. In my book,
I won't keep the end for such terrible brevity. Dear
black girl, sweet babies, there's been no end. And when
I read this, I thought of you so much because
(24:33):
of this one line. Revision is a struggle towards truth,
And sixteen nineteen is such a beautiful revision in the
work that you're doing is always moving. That's closer towards
the truth, and even if people try to discredit it,
try to push it back. For whatever reason, you are
telling the truth and not being afraid of what might
come because people don't want to hear the truth. So
(24:54):
my question to you is like, when that comes that
discredit those vicious things that happen to you online and
off for people they don't want you or us to win,
how do you handle that? How do you take care
of yourself? And who are the people that keep you,
that hold you while you do this work? You know,
thank you and thank you for recognizing how important this
(25:17):
work was to me and to all of us that
we did take a lot of care. I didn't know
if anyone would read this or what this would become,
but that our ancestors and our people deserve to have
this told in a dignified, proper way that was both
unflinching but not further trying to rob us of our humanity.
(25:40):
And I think because this meant so much to all
of us, I mean I expected the attacks. Clearly, you
don't produce a project like this that makes the arguments
that we make in the New York Times, which people
feel they have a certain ownership over and that someone
like me shouldn't even be able to bring something like
this fourth from the New York Times. We were going
(26:02):
to get scrutiny and critique and attacks. I knew all
of that, but I also take them really personally because
of the care that we did take and that our
people don't deserve. You know, they're attacking me, but they're
really attacking our history. They're really attacking our contributions, and
they're attacking us telling the truth about who we are
(26:24):
as a people and as a country. With that said, though,
I just you know, I say this again again, I
really am built for this because I know to whom
I belong. I know what this work means to the
people that I wrote it for, and I know that
this work is right. I know that we are deserving
(26:45):
of having our story told this way. America would not
exist without us, it just wouldn't. And I know the
decades of scholarship, much of it by Black scholars who
were determined to push back on this narrative that wrote
us out in the margins. All of that means that
I just have confidence and surety about the work that
(27:08):
I'm doing. I don't do work for a claim. I
don't do work because I'm trying to get somewhere in life.
I do the work because it's the work that I'm
called to do. You sometimes get caught up in the
criticism and it plays an outside kind of role in
your psyche. But when I go out and you know
(27:28):
the black delta flight attended, or the black doorman, or
my driver when I was going to an event, who
I had to mail him a book because he just
couldn't believe he was driving me, like regular black people
who know and value this work, then what can anyone
say to me? So I just feel honored it. And
this is where studying people like I to be welles right,
(27:51):
Studying the way that people who particularly black women, who
try to tell the truth. I mean Tony Morrison, right,
They attacked her Nobel Prize and said that her getting
it delegitimized the Nobel Prize, the same way that they
said that about me and my Pulitzer. So studying history
means that we have the backbone and the strength to
know what to expect, and that if our ancestors could
(28:12):
bear it without the resources we have, without the institutional support,
I can certainly bear it. So I'm great now. I
am drinking wine in the middle of the day, so
that might tell you something, But overall, I'm just proud.
Like you know, if people were not the right type
of people, we're not attacking this work. This work would
have failed because it would have told a comfortable and
(28:35):
comforting narrative. And this work should be troubling to the
people who have held power in this country, and it is.
So I'm proud of that. We are proud of you,
and it's given us the vocabulary. There are so many
things that I wanted to say that maybe that I
felt timid about or maybe I was like I don't know,
But the moment I can cite your book, I can
reference the things, I can go down a rabbit hole
(28:57):
of knowledge and feel empowered and know that like, this
is history, these are facts. This is not something you
can dispute with me because it lives in a real
space and it's now part of our collective consciousness. What
other things like motivate and inspire you from a creative standpoint.
So I hope all the writers who are listening to
this will be calmed by this, because whenever I read
(29:20):
about writers whom I admire their writing process and what
a message is. Then I feel calm because I'm like,
my writing process is a complete mess. It's just it's grueling,
and I have to write in the mornings. My mind
only functions super well in the morning, so I have
to be like, how early though we talk about five am,
four am, usually like seven or so, like not super early.
(29:44):
I gotta get up, get my coffee. I am a
morning person. I do wake up early. The house needs
to be empty. I need to write a silence. I'm
not one of those people who can write in a
coffee shop or write anywhere. Like I'm a bit of
a diva when it comes to writing. Everything has to
be kind of particular. I have a writing space in
my basement. It's like a bomb shelters in a basement.
There's no windows, there's nothing, no windows. No, it's just
(30:08):
because I just have to be alone. Writing is agonizing
for me. I mean there's probably been four times where
I just sat down and just everything flowed and I
was like, Oh, this is gonna be good. Partly because
I do an overwhelming amount of research, so by the
time I write, I just know way too much. I
have way too many sources and it's hard to figure
out how to start and how much to leave out.
(30:29):
So I read this somewhere when I was reading about
other writers writing process, and I don't remember who it was,
but they said, you have to for yourself to write
shitty first draft. And I was like, that's so liberating,
and so I wrote it on a piece of paper
and I like have it in my writing space, and
I'm like, just get it out, just get it out,
because otherwise it's like I'm agonizing over every single word
(30:52):
and you you've been sitting at the keyboard for two
hours and you have like one paragraph five hundred words
instead of five exactly. So what typically happens is I
research until I can't anymore. And part of it is
I just never feel like I know enough, and part
of it is just procrastination, where I'm like, as long
(31:13):
as i'm researching, I don't have to write, and then
when I write, I just sit down and write the
whole damn thing. So my husband would tell you, I
work fourteen fifteen hours just sitting at the desk drinking seltzer,
and don't come down to talk to me, don't say
anything to me. There'll be book scattered everywhere, note book
scattered everywhere, and I'll just write that thing obsessively until
(31:34):
I have a draft out. That's typically how I do it.
So like the Democracy Essay, the first version of it
probably revised twelve times, and then when I expanded the essay,
that was just as long of a revision process. And
it's just a constant revising. I'd never lack for motivation,
Like I get to write when I want to write
and what I want to write, and so whenever i'm writing,
(31:56):
it's because I'm getting to write something I feel is
important and yourself. Yeah, writing is like therapy, Like I
have this tension bottle up about something that I'm seeing
or something that I think needs to be addressed, and
then I can put it on the page and it's
like a release for me once I've gotten it down.
There's so much abundance in the project, each essay, each contribution.
(32:16):
You can go a million different directions and be brought
up the children's book. Can you talk a little bit
about the children's Bookie co wrote with Renee Watson, Born
on the Water. So I am so proud of Born
on the Water and my collaborators, Renee Watson, who's just
an amazing children's book author, and then Nicholas Smith, who
(32:37):
is an illustrator. It's really one of the most important
things that I've done. It came out of two things.
When the original project came out, I kept hearing from
so many parents, especially black parents, who said, I learned
so much reading the project. But I don't want my
child to have to wait until they're grown to have
an understanding of our legacy and our lineage. And I
(32:59):
really wish that there was something for kids. You know,
the magazine was turned into curriculum, but it was a
high school curriculum, so parents were asking for it. And then,
of course I was thinking a lot about my experience
as a child and what it would have meant to
me as a black girl to have an origin story
as opposed to feeling like we didn't have one and
(33:20):
every other group did. So that's really where the idea
came from. And I knew I wanted to write it,
but I'd never written a children's book before, and I
don't have, you know, the hubris to think that just
because you're good at writing in one way, you'll be
great at writing in another. So I asked you know,
to be paired with a veteran children's book writer. But
I said, I actually want to like co write it,
(33:40):
like I don't want it to be like my name,
But she actually wrote it. So they introduced me to Renee,
and I had read some of her children's book, but
then I read everything that she wrote and we met
and just hit it off, and so we really co
wrote it. Like every other Stanza is either her or me,
And we were talking the other day and we're like,
(34:01):
sometimes we can't even tell who wrote what Some of
them I can tell. I'm like, yeah, that's definitely what
I wrote, but others like we had such a synergy
and connection, and she was so gracious to be paired
with someone who doesn't write children's book. But to see
the response of children and their parents to this book
and what it has meant to them has just been
(34:23):
so great, especially for black descendants of American slavery. Because
even my daughter when she was in elementary school with
a lot of black kids, but most of the black
kids were coming from the Caribbean. So when they would
do flag Day, all those kids were like proud with
their flag from Trinidad or their flag from the dr
and my child was like, what's my flag? And so
(34:45):
for her Black American children to be able to claim
their lineage was just really important to me. And it's
been a beautiful thing in the world. I have to
talk about Howard. Yes, you are now a professor at
Howard University. Tell us how that came to be, And
how do you feel now that you are part officially
(35:05):
part of the Mecca Because we grandfathered you in a
long time ago. There's always been the love, but now
you're there. What does it feel like, What is it
like working with the students? Tell me all of it. Listen,
I mean you you already know, Laurie that I have
long coveted people who actually could make a claim to
the Mecca. I didn't know really about HBCUs when I
was in high school. My husband was the first black
(35:27):
person I ever met whose grandparents had a college degree.
I didn't even know that was possible, which makes me
feel like so naive, But so I always wished I
had gone to an HBCU, and particularly Howard, just because
of the legacy and particularly the legacy of black writers.
M and T used to be like, you should come
(35:49):
to homecoming, and I always feel like I can't come.
It'll kill me because I'm just an imposter, like I
can't do it. I wasn't actually going to come to
Howard because I feel like Howard does get even though
I desperately wanted to. Don't talk about no, no, you
were going to come. No, But I feel like Howard gets,
you know, for HBCUs, it gets a lot of the resources. Yeah,
(36:09):
I was trying to like, how could I lend my
resources best? But then I talked to ton of Hasey
and he was like, you know, if you come outcome
and I was like, okay, I can't. I can't, I can't.
Let me just say it's been an absolute dream. The
faculty is just amazing and brilliant and love their people
and the students. They didn't choose Howard as their second pick, right,
(36:32):
they were like, this is only school I wanted to
go to, and my students are just so confident and
passionate and smart. It's just been amazing you now I
can claim Howard. Finally, the other Dad was on campus
and they played lift every voice and sing from the
bell tower. I was like, I am home and it's
(36:52):
not too late. It's time for rapid fire. So I'm
(37:23):
just gonna say a thing. I'm gonna say a sentence
and you just say like the first thing that comes
to mind, Like it doesn't have to be like a
full right now, it's fun though. Favorite TV show at
the moment Snowfall. Oh that's a good one. Okay. Favorite
pair of Jordan's. My favorite number is Jordan eleven. So
now I'm really into Jordan Ones. And I have these black,
white and red news Prince Jordan's said, just you know,
(37:46):
oh my gosh, they should they need to make a
sixty nineteen Jordan's. Okay, they're good. Okay, because you're a
famous redhead, we know your Look. What are your go
to curly hair products? Oh god, oh, I used so
much products. I use Jane Carter Solution. I use this
as I am a black curl activist. I use Curls.
(38:09):
Curls actually has a great pick and comb that I use.
And we'll just go with that for now. Favorite movie
of all time Buckles? All right, how many tattoos do
you have and what are they? So? I have a
feather on my foot, which is a peacock feather because
my nickname back home is bird and I got it
in honor with my father when he died. I have
(38:29):
a butterfly on my arm, which stands for renewal. I
have an Africa with a peace sign on my wrist.
I have a waterloo tattooed on my right wrist, which
is my bitch, Stay humble tattooed. Just always remind myself
I came from the dirt, and to the dirt, I
can be returned, so be humble. And then I have
a tattoo of a hibiscus and a and a butterfly.
(38:51):
And my baby sister passed away some years ago and
she had that tattoo in her arm, so I got
that in honor of her. I love that I only
have ones ottoo, but I've been thinking about getting more.
I have a box scout crown that my brother and
I did together. He's like a huge one on his
arm and I I got scared. I got scared. Let
me this out first. Yeah, I will say with the
four tattoo, I really wanted them to quit, but I
(39:13):
was like, I can't have a half done tattoo because
that was outside of childbirth. That was the most painful
thing I went through. Oh yikes, Ye, it that did
hurt if you just compare it to having a baby
that definitely did her. I love having these discussions that
highlight the incredible journeys that black authors take to tell
our story. For vision is a struggle toward truth. I'm
(39:36):
honored to be fighting in the world with Nicole Hannah Jones.
Reading The sixteen nineteen Project as a Black woman, I
learned about my place in society and the power of
acknowledging our collective history. This book made me feel proud,
proud to be part of a generation of readers that
values the contributions of our ancestors. Nicole's work reaffirms what
(40:00):
I believe is possible when we recognize our self worth
as black people. The sixteen nineteen Project, a new origin story,
is out now. In our next episode, I'll be joined
by poet and author Elizabeth Assavedo to discuss her path
(40:23):
to poetry and how music led the way Well read.
Black Girl is a production of Pushkin Industries. It is
written and hosted by me Glory Dam and produced by
(40:44):
Cher Vincent and Brittany Brown. Our associate editor is Keishall Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our showrunner is
Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Mia Lobell and Leet
Hall Molad at Pushkin thanks to Heather Fame, Carly Migliori,
(41:05):
Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton, Jen Goera, john On Schnars, and
Jacob Wiseberg. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram
at Well Read Black Girl. You can find Pushkin and
all social media platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can
sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. If
(41:25):
you have a question, a recommendation, or you just want
to say hi, email us at WRBG at pushkin dot Fm.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin industry,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast
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(41:46):
ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple
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do you get to hear what's on my mind, what's
on my radar, and of course what's on my reading list?
(42:08):
Each week. To find more podcasts, listen on iHeartRadio, app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
Pushkin Before we get started, let's talk about Pushkin Plus.
Pushkin Plus is a subscription podcast program available on Apple Podcasts.
Members will get access to exclusive bonus content like my
(00:38):
weekly Bookmarks, where I talk about how I got a
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You'll get uninterrupted listening to many of your favorite podcasts
like Revisionist History, Cautionary Tales, and The Happiness Lab. Sign
up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple
Podcasts or at Pushkin dot m. When The New York
(01:05):
Times magazine journalist Nicole Hannah Jones started work on the
sixty nineteen project in twenty nineteen, she realized it was
a project she had actually been working towards all of
her life. I don't do work for a claim. I
don't do work because I'm trying to get somewhere in life.
I do the work because it's the work that I'm
(01:25):
called to do. In high school, she learned about the
significance of the year sixteen nineteen to African Americans, and
it stuck with her. Sixteen nineteen marked the beginning of
slavery in America as a nation, and four hundred years later,
Nicole's on a mission to make sure everybody knows about this.
I know to whom I belong, I know what this
(01:48):
work means to the people that I wrote it for,
and I know that this work is right. I know
that we are deserving of having our story told this way.
America would not exist without us, It just wouldn't. Nicole
is right. We do deserve to have our story told
and told with respect. That's why in twenty twenty one,
(02:11):
she published the sixteen nineteen Project, A New Origin Story.
It's an anthology of essays, fiction and poetry by known
Black authors, historians, poets, and artists. Welcome to Well Read
(02:39):
Black Girl, the literary kickback you didn't even know you needed.
I'm your host, Glory Adam, and this week I'm speaking
with Nicole Hannah Jones. We talk about how social justice
showed up in her childhood, her writing process as a journalist,
and why she can finally claim Howard University as her own.
(03:07):
Hey girl, how's it going. How are you feeling today? Hey?
I'm doing great and thank you for having me on.
I'm looking forward to the discussion. So, first question, how
did reading and writing show up in your childhood? Oh? Man,
I cannot remember a time where I was not both
an avid reader and a writer. Some of my earliest
(03:29):
memories are reading the newspaper with my dad. I was
always surrounded by books. I was always going to the
library as soon as I got old enough to go
by myself. I would just walk. I always have my
nose in a book, whether we were in a car
or I was sitting in the living room while my
family was watching television. I just always loved books, and
(03:50):
I always used writing to express myself. I kept a
journal from a young age, and then I would write poetry.
I would write short stories that I had in my head.
So I always feel like those two things go together.
I love reading the acknowledgement of folks after you write
a book. But one thing that stood out with your acknowledgements,
(04:11):
there is a person, mister ray Dial, that you shout
out and you give so much love. Can you tell
me about him and how he influenced you? Absolutely? Mister
ray Dial was my African American Studies teacher, and he
was the only black male teacher I ever had. And
I took this one semester Black Studies Elective, and I say,
(04:34):
I mean truly that class I was transformative for me.
Not only was mister Dial just an amazing teacher, he
was funny, he was warm, he was teaching that class
like it was college level because he had taught at
the college level before. He was asked to come to
work in my school district, and he was brought there
specifically because I was at a white high school where
(04:57):
most of the black kids were bust in and there
were just a lot of racial issues at the high school,
and so they recruited him to come help deal with that.
And the way when you say racial issues habin at
your high school, like what exactly did your experience? So again,
our high school was the white high school, and we
were busting as part of a voluntary school desegregation program.
(05:18):
So nearly all of the black kids in the high school,
we were about twenty percent of the population, were busted
in every day from the east side of town, which
was where all the black people lived, into a high
school that wasn't ours. And every day students and teachers
made us aware that the school wasn't ours. So there
were racial fights, we had protests, I led school walkouts.
(05:40):
There was just a lot of racial tension, and there
was a pretty deep racial divide in the school. I
was one of the only black kids in my higher
academic courses. All of the other black kids were in
what was considered the general ed and lower academic courses,
and there were just tensions in the cafeteria, there were
tensions after school. It was a fraught time, and mister
(06:02):
Dial was recruited. I'm not sure if he was recruited
to help keep black students in line, but what they
ended up getting was a teacher who was helping turn
us into little mini revolutionary. So my best girlfriend from
high school we founded an underground student newspaper in opposition
to our white school newspaper. Oh wait, you have to
(06:23):
tell me what was the name of Mister dal could
tell you. He remembers every single thing. I cannot remember
the name of it, but it was something black, I
know that. And he would sneak and let us into
the teacher's lounge to print our newspaper. Yeah, and he
would advise us, right, okay, you're gonna do this, walk out.
This is what you need to do so you don't
get expelled. He was that kind of teacher where he
(06:46):
believed in our right to assert ourselves. He understood our struggles,
and he was trying to guide us so that we
could both protest what we thought was wrong about the school,
but do it in a way that they weren't going
to be able to rob us of our education. And
he was just amazing. He is the epitome of that
educator that changes your life. And to this day, I
(07:07):
still talked to mister dal When I did the book
launch or the sixteen nineteen project in my hometown, I
called mister Dow and I was like, you have to
be on stage with me. And so my final project
in his class, he said to me he still had it.
I graduated in nineteen ninety four and he still had
my final project and he actually mailed it to me.
And I was like, mister Dow, how could you even
(07:28):
keep something that that is that old and know where
it is? But he said he just knew, he knew that.
He was like, I didn't keep most kids final project,
but I knew I needed to keep yours, and sixteen
nineteen was in there. And actually I had written a
little piece on the Roan Bennett in my final project,
so it was kind of amazing. I had completely forgotten
about it, but mister dal had not, and to see
(07:49):
that from you starting your own underground newspaper to like
leading protests with the support of mister Dial when you
got bust back to your house, what was mister Hannah saying, Like,
what was your father thinking? Was he in support of this?
What was your family's response? Were they in line with
it or did they push for like more respectability politics.
(08:10):
I definitely did not come from a household had engaged
in respectability politics. My family's very very working class. My
dad loved to cuss, love to drink, love to throw
a party, So we were not the type of household
that engaged in that. Now they wanted to make sure
I was going to be successful. I was also raised
in a household where all three of us girls were
(08:31):
told we were going to go to college. They didn't
care what we studied, but we were going to go
to college. So what my parents mainly wanted was to
make sure I wasn't doing anything that was going to
mess me up academically. But they were in support. I mean,
they weren't surprised. Mister Dow gave me kind of the
book knowledge that I needed, but my politics were already there.
(08:52):
I grew up in a social justice household. My mom
was taking us to protests even when I was a child.
My mom was heavy into her labor union. We went
to a social justice Catholic church. Like this was really
just part of who I was as a child. But
this is the danger of an education because I didn't
have the knowledge of black political struggle of black history.
(09:16):
And once I started putting those two things together, I
became an incorrigible student. Let me say that, what were
one or two books that you read that lets you know, like, yes,
was it Boldwin, was it Morrison? Do you have some
authors that come to mind immediately? This is going to
(09:38):
be a very revealing answer because I talked to Tanahazi
a lot about this. I didn't read really any black
literature growing up. I was being exposed to Black historians,
African Origins of Civilization, those type of books, but I
wasn't reading literature. I didn't read Bald until I was
in my thirties. I didn't read Tony Morrison until I
was in my twenties. And I think you can actually
(10:00):
see that in my writing, right, I'm not a super
literary writer because I didn't grow up with that The
only black literature I really read when I was in
high school was Length and Hughes. And that's because at
my high school we had one poem by Length and Hughes,
a Dream Deferred. And then I decided to do my
senior ap project on Length and Hughes, and I went
(10:22):
to the library and checked out all of his short stories,
all of his poetry. And then when I got to college,
I took a class on the Harlem Renaissance, and that's
where I was for the first time exposed to Zoro
Neil Hurston. I took an entire class on Richard Right.
So that was the first time I actually had any
exposure to black literature because I didn't come from a
(10:43):
literary household. I talk about this in the preface for
the book. My mom loved like Daniel Still romance novels,
and my dad loved westerns. I'm so glad you brought
up Length and Hughes because I was surprised by American
Heartbreak sixteen nineteen. So I have read so much Lengths
in Hughes and it's like just one of the core
foundational poets that you read as a black artist, as
a black person, you know, length and Hughes, and everyone
(11:05):
refers to dream Deferred, But I had never read American Heartbreak.
So did you make that correlation early? Is that something
you knew from your studies as a child, or it
was later on that you're like, oh my god, he
was writing about the same thing. This was after the
sixteen nineteen project originally published. So no, and I've read
I mean I've probably read more lengthy hughes than your
average person. I literally read all of his short stories everything.
(11:28):
By the way, short stories are amazing. One of my
favorite books is The Ways of Wife Folks, which I
actually have with me. I carried it with me sometimes
because I just love rereading the short stories. But after
the sixteen nineteen project published, someone on Twitter, I think
it's the Binike Library. I think they might have his
papers shared the poem on Twitter and then someone tagged
me in it, and I was like, oh my god,
(11:49):
my favorite poet was writing about sixteen nineteen. And then
I realized, you know, the more I've done this project,
like doctor King was talking about sixteen nineteen all of
the time, but never in any of the speeches that
I ever read or that they talked about. And you
realized that within certain circles sixteen nineteen, it always stood
(12:10):
in as a starting point as this lineage, but it
had been just largely a race from kind of the
common memory, right, And that's the key word, the common memory.
So now that I've read this book and we've been
having conversations and it's part of the public consciousness, I
see it all the time, and I don't think I
had any awareness previously. And it's especially being a student
(12:32):
at Howard and I feel like I'm a well rounded
black person, like I do all these things. I'm like,
how did we miss us? Because we weren't taught. I
want to know when did you first become aware of
it to be wells? Because you were talking about like
history and all these things you were reading. Was she
part of what you were reading with mister dial and
your household was not much later too? So I have
(12:54):
racked my brain about this, and I feel like I
can't remember when I didn't know her name. I mean,
I have these pictures in my head of Black History
Month and our teachers would put up like five great
Black historical figures and they looked like, you know, those
little Victorian brooches. It would be like a picture like
that up on the wall, and that I'DA. B Wells
was one of those, along with Frederick Douglas, George Washington Carver,
(13:17):
and Harriet Tubman, and they said she was a journalist,
but didn't say what type of journalism she was doing,
what was the subject of her journalism. So I knew
her name, but I really didn't know anything else about
her except that she was an important historical figure. And
then when I was at Notre Dame, I was an
African American studies major, and I was very nerdy, I
still am, and so I would go through the stacks
(13:40):
in the bookstore and see what teachers were assigning in
classes that I wasn't able to take, and then I
would buy those books. And one of the books I
saw was the autobiography that Ida b Wells wrote, and
I was like, hum, I don't really know who she is,
Like I know her name, but I don't really know
who she is. And so I started flipping through it
and I was like, oh my god, this woman wasn't
(14:02):
no joke. And so I bought the autobiography and after
I read that, I was just like, this is my
spiritual godmother, right This is the model of a black
woman coming fully into her power and using her voice
for the benefit of her people, and being fearless and courageous.
So you had this experience with mister Dial. You were
(14:23):
just starting to decide what you wanted to be when
you grew up. Why did you decide to actually become
a journalist? So you know, I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa,
and I always say, there aren't a lot of black
people in Iowa, but there's still enough to segregate us.
So that's why we were part of a bussing program,
and we faced a lot of discrimination in the school
(14:43):
and a lot of stereotypes about the black side of
town being dangerous, about the students who were coming from
the black side of town being dangerous, about us not
being as smart. And to be clear, I said, I
did read newspapers my whole life. I subscribed to Time
magazine starting in the seventh grade. I got my first
letter to the editor published when I was eleven years
old about Jesse Jackson. And I told you I was nerdy.
(15:07):
You know, I was first in the nation primary and
this was teen eighty eight and Jesse Jackson was running
to become president, and he didn't do very well in
the primary. And this tells you how to nerd am.
Because I'm eleven years old, I'm paying attention to the
presidential primary. And I felt he didn't do well because
he was black, at least partly, And so I wrote
a letter to the editor and I just said I
(15:29):
felt like he was a good candidate and we should
have given him a better chance, and that one day
we were going to have a black president, whether we
liked it or not. Eleven eleven Obama, It's going to happen.
And every day after I sent the letter in, I
would rush home from school look in the newspaper to
(15:50):
see how they published it. In one day they did,
and I just remember feeling like, oh, I can see
something I don't like and I can write about it.
And I might not change people's minds, but I can
force people to at least grapple and acknowledge how I
feel about it. So the idea that I might be
a journalist was there for a pretty long time. And
then I only aplied to one college. I only applied
(16:12):
to Notre Dame because I believed I needed to go
to a prestigious college, because I felt as a black girl,
I had to have a certain credential to try to
mitigate racism. And I had to go close to home
because my family was working class. They weren't going to
be able to fly me home. If I wanted to
come home, I had to be within driving distance, and
(16:33):
Notre Dame did not offer journalism. So I studied my
first love. My first love really is history. I studied
history in African American studies and considered maybe getting my
PhD in history and being a historian. But I ultimately
decided that journalism could wed the best of both of
those things. I could be writing about contemporary society. I
(16:54):
could write about inequality today and hopefully try to work
in a way to advance our people. But I could
use history in my writing. And that's when I decided
for sure that I wanted to become a journalist. After
the break, Nicole and I dig deeper into her process
of creating the sixteen nineteen project, her writing practices, and
(17:14):
how she ended up in my alma mater, Howard University.
I'm Glory Adam, and you're listening to well read Black Girl.
I'm joined today by Nicole Hannah Jones pulled to prize
(17:37):
winning journalists and the author of the sixteen nineteen Project.
Can we get in your mind a little bit and
just the process of when you're crafting a story, walkway
through the research process of deciding that this was the
book to write, and how you even approach the editors
(17:59):
at The New York Times. It's very clear that they've
been supportive of you from the beginning. There is so
much what feels just like a collective care when it
comes to publishing this work and making sure that you're
at the forefront and you're able to really curate it
the way you want. Can you talk about the contributors,
even the titles of each chapter? How did this all
(18:19):
come together? Yeah? I feel like in some ways I've
been working towards the sixteen nineteen Project my entire career.
I became a journalist because I wanted to write about
black people, and I wanted to write about racial inequality.
But I wanted to do investigative reporting around racial inequality
because I've always felt that so much reporting around race
(18:40):
is superficial, that it's really just listing everything that black
people suffer from, as if no one or no thing
is causing that suffering, and as someone who studies history
and love's history, I know that history for me explain
the architecture of inequality, and so in journalism you could
do the same thing. And almost everything that I've approached,
(19:02):
as you said, most of my career it was always
how can I help people understand this modern phenomenon by
helping them understand the history and the tensional way that
this inequality was built. How can I tell a narrative
that people actually care about? Right? So it was always
these sorts of things, and the way that I approached
the sixteen nineteen project is the way I approach most things.
(19:24):
Having a history degree, I do an extensive amount of
historical research on anything that I'm working on. I read
often multiple books. I do original archival research depending on
what it is that I'm writing. I talk to historians,
I read sociology. I mean, I basically do a literature review.
(19:45):
I like to see everything that's been written along the
subject and try to figure out what can I offer
that will be surprising. As you know, when it comes
to raise, everyone thinks they know, but they don't really know, right,
And so I think of, like, what are all the
arguments I hear what are the objections? What are the
things that people think that they understand but they really don't,
(20:05):
And then how can I challenge that with the writing?
But I didn't know that who was writing it would
be the ultimate testimony to the resilience of our people
and the resilience of our ancestors, that the descendants had
to be the primary shaper of this kind of collective
reckoning with our country. It's so beautiful to encounter this
(20:28):
work because the list of scholars and writers, you know,
you have everyone from Tracy K. Smith in here to
Lendedge to Dorothy Roberts to Barry Jenkins. I mean you
have goud a ranking. It's just so phenomenal. And each
chapter it's simply one word. So you have a democracy race,
sugar progress, Like every single chapter literally shows how the
(20:52):
legacy of slavery isn't everything we do. It's in the
fabric of our constitution and this idea of a functioning
democracy that is what you are illustrating in this book.
How did you know who to pick from the topic
I gotta have this person. Was it a hard process
and narrat down to the contributors? Yeah, so I fought
(21:12):
really hard for all of the titles to be one word,
because to me, the simplicity of just reading the table
of contents and being like, dang traffic, healthcare, medicine, capitalism, democracy, right,
just that single word really speaks to how foundational the
institutional slavery was, that it has touched all of these institutions,
(21:34):
and mostly for the contributors, I knew who I wanted,
particularly for the essays. When I first pitched the project.
One of the first things I did was I conveyed
this massive brainstorming session with scholars whose work had informed mind,
so economists, historians, sociologists, art historians, and many of them
(21:57):
ended up writing for it. And then it was just
a matter of what is the subject that we feel
needs to be covered, and who do we think is
the best person to write that, And so, you know,
Martha Jones own Citizenship, to me, the most obvious choice
in the world Taya Mouse, who's an Afro Indigenous scholar
at Harvard to write the story on the dispossession of
native land. Khalil Muhammed actually pitched the idea of sugar
(22:24):
at our initial brainstorm. That's not what scholarship. He's known
for but it was a brilliant essay, so it really
was truly collaborative in that way. And then as far
as the literary timeline, which is the short fiction and poetry,
that really was the idea of Jake Silver seeing the
editor in chief. We have been having a discussion about
(22:45):
how much of our history is it told through black
people because we weren't able to read and write as
we were experiencing so much of this, and what if
we had some of the greatest American writers reimagined these moments.
And we just did a massive Excel spreadsheet and we
just listed every black writer that we would love to
see participate. And some are expected, you know, Rita Dove
(23:09):
Post Surprise Winner, and others are not. Terry McMillan, who
he wouldn't think about being in this type of project.
But I'm like, I love Terry McMillan as a writer, right,
and who can't see Mike's president. I saw that she
got Terry McMillan over here. Yeah, Will is like the greatest.
I feel like she's underappreciated, like she's the best at everything,
(23:29):
like exactly she was, so, you know, excited and honored
because this isn't something people would typically think of her.
As you know Barry Jenkins, he's a director and a screenwriter.
But the first time I read his poem it made
me cry. It's haunting and beautiful. Like I said, what
greater testament to what our ancestors bore than to be
(23:49):
able to have some of the greatest writers and historians
in America all in one volume, and almost all of
them are black. Like to me, this is the testimony
and mean takes her breath away just the magnitude of
this project. It just has such like a tenderness to it.
And not only are you thinking about like our ask,
(24:10):
but you are reimagining our future too. There's a poem
on brevity by Camille Dungee, the last Deans of the poem,
it says, revision is a struggle towards truth. In my book,
I won't keep the end for such terrible brevity. Dear
black girl, sweet babies, there's been no end. And when
I read this, I thought of you so much because
(24:33):
of this one line. Revision is a struggle towards truth,
And sixteen nineteen is such a beautiful revision in the
work that you're doing is always moving. That's closer towards
the truth, and even if people try to discredit it,
try to push it back. For whatever reason, you are
telling the truth and not being afraid of what might
come because people don't want to hear the truth. So
(24:54):
my question to you is like, when that comes that
discredit those vicious things that happen to you online and
off for people they don't want you or us to win,
how do you handle that? How do you take care
of yourself? And who are the people that keep you,
that hold you while you do this work? You know,
thank you and thank you for recognizing how important this
(25:17):
work was to me and to all of us that
we did take a lot of care. I didn't know
if anyone would read this or what this would become,
but that our ancestors and our people deserve to have
this told in a dignified, proper way that was both
unflinching but not further trying to rob us of our humanity.
(25:40):
And I think because this meant so much to all
of us, I mean I expected the attacks. Clearly, you
don't produce a project like this that makes the arguments
that we make in the New York Times, which people
feel they have a certain ownership over and that someone
like me shouldn't even be able to bring something like
this fourth from the New York Times. We were going
(26:02):
to get scrutiny and critique and attacks. I knew all
of that, but I also take them really personally because
of the care that we did take and that our
people don't deserve. You know, they're attacking me, but they're
really attacking our history. They're really attacking our contributions, and
they're attacking us telling the truth about who we are
(26:24):
as a people and as a country. With that said, though,
I just you know, I say this again again, I
really am built for this because I know to whom
I belong. I know what this work means to the
people that I wrote it for, and I know that
this work is right. I know that we are deserving
(26:45):
of having our story told this way. America would not
exist without us, it just wouldn't. And I know the
decades of scholarship, much of it by Black scholars who
were determined to push back on this narrative that wrote
us out in the margins. All of that means that
I just have confidence and surety about the work that
(27:08):
I'm doing. I don't do work for a claim. I
don't do work because I'm trying to get somewhere in life.
I do the work because it's the work that I'm
called to do. You sometimes get caught up in the
criticism and it plays an outside kind of role in
your psyche. But when I go out and you know
(27:28):
the black delta flight attended, or the black doorman, or
my driver when I was going to an event, who
I had to mail him a book because he just
couldn't believe he was driving me, like regular black people
who know and value this work, then what can anyone
say to me? So I just feel honored it. And
this is where studying people like I to be welles right,
(27:51):
Studying the way that people who particularly black women, who
try to tell the truth. I mean Tony Morrison, right,
They attacked her Nobel Prize and said that her getting
it delegitimized the Nobel Prize, the same way that they
said that about me and my Pulitzer. So studying history
means that we have the backbone and the strength to
know what to expect, and that if our ancestors could
(28:12):
bear it without the resources we have, without the institutional support,
I can certainly bear it. So I'm great now. I
am drinking wine in the middle of the day, so
that might tell you something, But overall, I'm just proud.
Like you know, if people were not the right type
of people, we're not attacking this work. This work would
have failed because it would have told a comfortable and
(28:35):
comforting narrative. And this work should be troubling to the
people who have held power in this country, and it is.
So I'm proud of that. We are proud of you,
and it's given us the vocabulary. There are so many
things that I wanted to say that maybe that I
felt timid about or maybe I was like I don't know,
But the moment I can cite your book, I can
reference the things, I can go down a rabbit hole
(28:57):
of knowledge and feel empowered and know that like, this
is history, these are facts. This is not something you
can dispute with me because it lives in a real
space and it's now part of our collective consciousness. What
other things like motivate and inspire you from a creative standpoint.
So I hope all the writers who are listening to
this will be calmed by this, because whenever I read
(29:20):
about writers whom I admire their writing process and what
a message is. Then I feel calm because I'm like,
my writing process is a complete mess. It's just it's grueling,
and I have to write in the mornings. My mind
only functions super well in the morning, so I have
to be like, how early though we talk about five am,
four am, usually like seven or so, like not super early.
(29:44):
I gotta get up, get my coffee. I am a
morning person. I do wake up early. The house needs
to be empty. I need to write a silence. I'm
not one of those people who can write in a
coffee shop or write anywhere. Like I'm a bit of
a diva when it comes to writing. Everything has to
be kind of particular. I have a writing space in
my basement. It's like a bomb shelters in a basement.
There's no windows, there's nothing, no windows. No, it's just
(30:08):
because I just have to be alone. Writing is agonizing
for me. I mean there's probably been four times where
I just sat down and just everything flowed and I
was like, Oh, this is gonna be good. Partly because
I do an overwhelming amount of research, so by the
time I write, I just know way too much. I
have way too many sources and it's hard to figure
out how to start and how much to leave out.
(30:29):
So I read this somewhere when I was reading about
other writers writing process, and I don't remember who it was,
but they said, you have to for yourself to write
shitty first draft. And I was like, that's so liberating,
and so I wrote it on a piece of paper
and I like have it in my writing space, and
I'm like, just get it out, just get it out,
because otherwise it's like I'm agonizing over every single word
(30:52):
and you you've been sitting at the keyboard for two
hours and you have like one paragraph five hundred words
instead of five exactly. So what typically happens is I
research until I can't anymore. And part of it is
I just never feel like I know enough, and part
of it is just procrastination, where I'm like, as long
(31:13):
as i'm researching, I don't have to write, and then
when I write, I just sit down and write the
whole damn thing. So my husband would tell you, I
work fourteen fifteen hours just sitting at the desk drinking seltzer,
and don't come down to talk to me, don't say
anything to me. There'll be book scattered everywhere, note book
scattered everywhere, and I'll just write that thing obsessively until
(31:34):
I have a draft out. That's typically how I do it.
So like the Democracy Essay, the first version of it
probably revised twelve times, and then when I expanded the essay,
that was just as long of a revision process. And
it's just a constant revising. I'd never lack for motivation,
Like I get to write when I want to write
and what I want to write, and so whenever i'm writing,
(31:56):
it's because I'm getting to write something I feel is
important and yourself. Yeah, writing is like therapy, Like I
have this tension bottle up about something that I'm seeing
or something that I think needs to be addressed, and
then I can put it on the page and it's
like a release for me once I've gotten it down.
There's so much abundance in the project, each essay, each contribution.
(32:16):
You can go a million different directions and be brought
up the children's book. Can you talk a little bit
about the children's Bookie co wrote with Renee Watson, Born
on the Water. So I am so proud of Born
on the Water and my collaborators, Renee Watson, who's just
an amazing children's book author, and then Nicholas Smith, who
(32:37):
is an illustrator. It's really one of the most important
things that I've done. It came out of two things.
When the original project came out, I kept hearing from
so many parents, especially black parents, who said, I learned
so much reading the project. But I don't want my
child to have to wait until they're grown to have
an understanding of our legacy and our lineage. And I
(32:59):
really wish that there was something for kids. You know,
the magazine was turned into curriculum, but it was a
high school curriculum, so parents were asking for it. And then,
of course I was thinking a lot about my experience
as a child and what it would have meant to
me as a black girl to have an origin story
as opposed to feeling like we didn't have one and
(33:20):
every other group did. So that's really where the idea
came from. And I knew I wanted to write it,
but I'd never written a children's book before, and I
don't have, you know, the hubris to think that just
because you're good at writing in one way, you'll be
great at writing in another. So I asked you know,
to be paired with a veteran children's book writer. But
I said, I actually want to like co write it,
(33:40):
like I don't want it to be like my name,
But she actually wrote it. So they introduced me to Renee,
and I had read some of her children's book, but
then I read everything that she wrote and we met
and just hit it off, and so we really co
wrote it. Like every other Stanza is either her or me,
And we were talking the other day and we're like,
(34:01):
sometimes we can't even tell who wrote what Some of
them I can tell. I'm like, yeah, that's definitely what
I wrote, but others like we had such a synergy
and connection, and she was so gracious to be paired
with someone who doesn't write children's book. But to see
the response of children and their parents to this book
and what it has meant to them has just been
(34:23):
so great, especially for black descendants of American slavery. Because
even my daughter when she was in elementary school with
a lot of black kids, but most of the black
kids were coming from the Caribbean. So when they would
do flag Day, all those kids were like proud with
their flag from Trinidad or their flag from the dr
and my child was like, what's my flag? And so
(34:45):
for her Black American children to be able to claim
their lineage was just really important to me. And it's
been a beautiful thing in the world. I have to
talk about Howard. Yes, you are now a professor at
Howard University. Tell us how that came to be, And
how do you feel now that you are part officially
(35:05):
part of the Mecca Because we grandfathered you in a
long time ago. There's always been the love, but now
you're there. What does it feel like, What is it
like working with the students? Tell me all of it. Listen,
I mean you you already know, Laurie that I have
long coveted people who actually could make a claim to
the Mecca. I didn't know really about HBCUs when I
was in high school. My husband was the first black
(35:27):
person I ever met whose grandparents had a college degree.
I didn't even know that was possible, which makes me
feel like so naive, But so I always wished I
had gone to an HBCU, and particularly Howard, just because
of the legacy and particularly the legacy of black writers.
M and T used to be like, you should come
(35:49):
to homecoming, and I always feel like I can't come.
It'll kill me because I'm just an imposter, like I
can't do it. I wasn't actually going to come to
Howard because I feel like Howard does get even though
I desperately wanted to. Don't talk about no, no, you
were going to come. No, But I feel like Howard gets,
you know, for HBCUs, it gets a lot of the resources. Yeah,
(36:09):
I was trying to like, how could I lend my
resources best? But then I talked to ton of Hasey
and he was like, you know, if you come outcome
and I was like, okay, I can't. I can't, I can't.
Let me just say it's been an absolute dream. The
faculty is just amazing and brilliant and love their people
and the students. They didn't choose Howard as their second pick, right,
(36:32):
they were like, this is only school I wanted to
go to, and my students are just so confident and
passionate and smart. It's just been amazing you now I
can claim Howard. Finally, the other Dad was on campus
and they played lift every voice and sing from the
bell tower. I was like, I am home and it's
(36:52):
not too late. It's time for rapid fire. So I'm
(37:23):
just gonna say a thing. I'm gonna say a sentence
and you just say like the first thing that comes
to mind, Like it doesn't have to be like a
full right now, it's fun though. Favorite TV show at
the moment Snowfall. Oh that's a good one. Okay. Favorite
pair of Jordan's. My favorite number is Jordan eleven. So
now I'm really into Jordan Ones. And I have these black,
white and red news Prince Jordan's said, just you know,
(37:46):
oh my gosh, they should they need to make a
sixty nineteen Jordan's. Okay, they're good. Okay, because you're a
famous redhead, we know your Look. What are your go
to curly hair products? Oh god, oh, I used so
much products. I use Jane Carter Solution. I use this
as I am a black curl activist. I use Curls.
(38:09):
Curls actually has a great pick and comb that I use.
And we'll just go with that for now. Favorite movie
of all time Buckles? All right, how many tattoos do
you have and what are they? So? I have a
feather on my foot, which is a peacock feather because
my nickname back home is bird and I got it
in honor with my father when he died. I have
(38:29):
a butterfly on my arm, which stands for renewal. I
have an Africa with a peace sign on my wrist.
I have a waterloo tattooed on my right wrist, which
is my bitch, Stay humble tattooed. Just always remind myself
I came from the dirt, and to the dirt, I
can be returned, so be humble. And then I have
a tattoo of a hibiscus and a and a butterfly.
(38:51):
And my baby sister passed away some years ago and
she had that tattoo in her arm, so I got
that in honor of her. I love that I only
have ones ottoo, but I've been thinking about getting more.
I have a box scout crown that my brother and
I did together. He's like a huge one on his
arm and I I got scared. I got scared. Let
me this out first. Yeah, I will say with the
four tattoo, I really wanted them to quit, but I
(39:13):
was like, I can't have a half done tattoo because
that was outside of childbirth. That was the most painful
thing I went through. Oh yikes, Ye, it that did
hurt if you just compare it to having a baby
that definitely did her. I love having these discussions that
highlight the incredible journeys that black authors take to tell
our story. For vision is a struggle toward truth. I'm
(39:36):
honored to be fighting in the world with Nicole Hannah Jones.
Reading The sixteen nineteen Project as a Black woman, I
learned about my place in society and the power of
acknowledging our collective history. This book made me feel proud,
proud to be part of a generation of readers that
values the contributions of our ancestors. Nicole's work reaffirms what
(40:00):
I believe is possible when we recognize our self worth
as black people. The sixteen nineteen Project, a new origin story,
is out now. In our next episode, I'll be joined
by poet and author Elizabeth Assavedo to discuss her path
(40:23):
to poetry and how music led the way Well read.
Black Girl is a production of Pushkin Industries. It is
written and hosted by me Glory Dam and produced by
(40:44):
Cher Vincent and Brittany Brown. Our associate editor is Keishall Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our showrunner is
Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Mia Lobell and Leet
Hall Molad at Pushkin thanks to Heather Fame, Carly Migliori,
(41:05):
Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton, Jen Goera, john On Schnars, and
Jacob Wiseberg. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram
at Well Read Black Girl. You can find Pushkin and
all social media platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can
sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. If
(41:25):
you have a question, a recommendation, or you just want
to say hi, email us at WRBG at pushkin dot Fm.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin industry,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast
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(41:46):
ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple
podcast subscriptions, and if you're already a subscriber, make sure
to check out my exclusive Bookmark series. You'll hear extended
interviews with book club members, bookstore owners, and more. And
do you get to hear what's on my mind, what's
on my radar, and of course what's on my reading list?
(42:08):
Each week. To find more podcasts, listen on iHeartRadio, app,
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