It’s not lost on me that conservatives’ framing of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her “1619 Project” as dangers to American classrooms targets a woman who likely knows more about the U.S. education system than all of the people trying to hide her work combined.
Hannah-Jones isn’t just a nonthreat to American students — through her work, she’s an advocate for them. An ally to them. Her years of education reporting, and the accolades she has won as a result, show a woman who knows that the biggest threats to American students are neglect and disinvestment — not books by Black authors.
I think this is what makes her a target. Jones was known among some conservatives years before “The 1619 Project” dropped. But the release of the project only accelerated attacks on her work, which zeroes in on the systemic issues plaguing American institutions.
That’s why Hannah-Jones gets the spotlight in today’s “Black History, Uncensored” feature. All month, we’re celebrating works from Black authors targeted with right-wing book bans. Jones has been placed at the center of conservatives’ effort to revise history, and you can’t understand the derision toward her in the present without reading some of her earlier work and seeing how it roils the conservative psyche.
The feature-length article she published with ProPublica in December 2014, about modern-day segregation and its impact on Missouri schools, is a prime example of the work I’m talking about.
In “School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson,” Hannah-Jones uses the police killing of Michael Brown to highlight the obstacles that he and other Black students had faced in Missouri, years before Brown was fatally shot by officer Darren Wilson.
She wrote:
About half of black male students at Normandy High never graduate. Just one in four graduates enters a four-year college. The college where Brown was headed is a troubled for-profit trade-school that a U.S. Senate report said…
Read the full article here
