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… - Nikole Hannah-Jones

It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas. This is our global truth, the truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there’s no repair. It is time — it is long past time — for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and all the devastation that it has wrought, and all the devastation that it continues to reap.

As we remember our brutal enslavement by people who believed themselves to be civilized, even as they tortured, abused and murdered other human beings for profit, for sugar for their tea, for molasses for their rum, for cotton to wear and for tobacco to smoke, we must remember most the fierce Black radical tradition of resistance, that did not begin with anti-colonialism efforts on the continent or with civil rights movements in the United States and other places, but with, as the scholar Cedric Robinson argued, the Cimarrones of Mexico, who ran away to Indigenous communities or formed their own fugitive communities known as palenques...

the entire premise of The 1619 Project is that the legacy of slavery was not banished along with the institution of slavery in 1865, that slavery is one of the oldest institutions in our society. The English settled Jamestown in 1607. And by 1619, just 12 years later, they’re engaging in African slavery. So, that is 150 years before they even decide that they want to become their own country. And that slavery shaped everything, nearly everything, about the country that would ultimately be established.