Top 15 Nikole Hannah-Jones Quotes

School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery.

None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.

We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans.

To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property.

The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow.

The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor.

If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.

Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].

White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.

While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened

I think we have to decide if we are going to grapple honestly with our country or not.

The idea that random white citizens have the authority to stop and question a Black person, and if that Black person does not comply, they can use lethal force, that is a legacy of the slave patrols, which deputized all white Americans with the ability to question and stop and detain Black people and make sure that they were not in white spaces where they weren’t supposed to be.

I think that we are ill-prepared for the moment that we’re in. I think too many political reporters just have too much faith in our political systems, and there is no evidence to back up that faith. So, I just hope that before it’s too late, enough of us get an understanding that we can’t cover what’s happening in our country right now as politics as usual, and you can’t dismiss all of these scholars of authoritarianism who are raising the alarm. We’ve got to do better. We know that reporting, the press, is the firewall of our democracy, and I don’t think the firewall is holding right now.

I have long said and claimed Ida B. Wells-Barnett as my spiritual godmother. She was honestly the first example of a Black woman doing the type of journalism that I wanted to do, which should tell you how undiverse or nondiverse the field of investigative reporting is, that I didn’t actually know living examples of Black women investigative reporters when I was young. So, she was a pioneering investigative journalist who really brought the scourge of lynching to a global audience. She would go into towns where a Black man or woman had just been lynched, and she would interview people, and she would document. And she was actually one of the early data reporters, because she started to collect data on how many lynchings were occurring, what were the reasons given for those lynchings, and then what did her reporting show. She also was a true intersectional woman. She was a suffragist and had to fight both for women’s rights to vote and against the racism within the suffragist movement. She was a civil rights activist. She was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where she had to fight against gender discrimination as a Black woman. And so, in so many ways, she was just this pioneering woman who fought for civil rights and equal rights across many fronts. And she was a woman who was largely reviled by white media. And I have in my Twitter bio that I’m a nasty — a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, because that’s what The New York Times, where I work, called Ida B. Wells while she was engaging in her anti-lynching crusade. So I take great strength from knowing that the attacks on me and the attacks on my work are really just part of a lineage of what happens when Black women and Black women journalists dare to challenge power and challenge authority. So, to receive the acknowledgment for this work about the Black experience on the same day that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who like so many Black journalists never received the acknowledgment that they deserved, was just deeply gratifying, because I do my work in service of them.

When Texas seceded in 1836, it seceded in order to form a slaveholding republic. If you don’t teach that, then children are not able to understand all of the inequality that they have today.