Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and The 1619 Project creator visits Collingswood

COLLINGSWOOD – Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, paid a visit here on July 9 at a crowded Scottish Rite Auditorium.

The colorful owner of Ida’s Bookshop, Jeannine A. Cook, planned a “birthday party” of sorts for Ida B. Wells, the legendary journalist and civil rights activist who was born July 16, 1862.

The celebration, which also marked the bookshop's third anniversary, brought Hannah-Jones to town.

Hannah-Jones is on a paperback tour for her book “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.”

The book, originally published in November 2021, is a “dramatic expansion” of essays presented in The 1619 Project, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in August 2019 — the 400th anniversary of enslaved people being brought to America.

The 1619 Project was met with some controversy, and that put Hannah-Jones front and center as the face of the project. It also helped spark a national debate about critical race theory, and what should or should not be taught in U.S. schools regarding the history of slavery in this country.

“There’s not a lot about the project that I would do differently," said Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter who covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine.

Hannah-Jones: 'I felt this was what I was literally put on this earth to do’

But she also noted "the beauty of having so many different iterations of the project,.

"Usually as a journalist, you publish something and it’s done,” said Hannah-Jones. “You don’t get to come back at it in any different way. We doubled the number of essays in the book than were in the original project, there was a podcast, then we did a documentary series."

The 1619 Project is also a six-part Hulu docuseries.

"I'm in a great place now, but it was really tough," said Hannah-Jones, who's the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Journalism & Democracy, both at Howard University.

"Around 2020 when the attacks against the project became really coordinated, at the same time we’re trying to grapple with this lynching (George Floyd) that we watched on television…Then the very personal attacks trying to discredit me as a journalist. I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t handle it well on social.”

When Hannah-Jones pitched the project, she was unsure if anyone would read it.

It was lengthy and addressed a topic that “we have not wanted to grapple with and we willfully wanted to have amnesia about.

“I did it because I felt I had to do it," she said. "I felt this was what I was literally put on this earth to do in that moment, that my entire career had worked to that moment to pitch that project and to see this project through and force a reckoning in the 400^th year of American slavery. We treat it as an asterisk, as marginal to the American story. It is the center of the story, y’all.”

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Also, for Ida’s Bookshop to make it to its three-year anniversary is a big deal. The shop got a tremendous amount of community support and donations to stay open earlier this year.

“We look beautiful,” Cook said to the crowd of about 600. “This is so beautiful to my spirit and my soul."

Hannah-Jones also has great admiration for Ida B. Wells. So much so, she even goes by Ida Bae Wells on X (formerly Twitter) as an ode to the late activist. “I consider Ida B. Wells to be my spiritual godmother,” Hannah-Jones said.

New Jersey was a ‘slave colony and a slave state’

The award-winning journalist, who lives in Brooklyn with her family, gave a quick lesson on the “segregationist” history in New Jersey.

“Here we are in the Northeast, and we like to pretend the Northeast was the liberal, progressive, abolitionist part of the country,” she said in response to a question. “We should be clear: New Jersey was a slave colony and a slave state

"In fact, slavery was in New Jersey until 1865, until the Civil War. Slavery was followed in New Jersey by a system of Jim Crow, we just don’t call it that. New Jersey was considered the south of the Northeast.”

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: A Pulitzer Prize winner visits Collingswood on book tour