Nikole Hannah-Jones, who stated that it would be an “honor” to have the riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death named after her 1619 Project, and who has earned millions of dollars from taxpayers since then, seems to be angry that the cash cow is giving less and less milk.
Hannah-Jones, who is easily triggered by any challenge to her fabulist narrative about the “slavocracy” that she claims is this country, was further angered after states began passing legislation forbidding the use of curriculum materials based on the 1619 Project (and the Critical Race Theory which “informs” it). Charging Republicans with “whitewashing history,” she tried to get the left “mad enough” to organize by warning them about the “dark and scary times.”
Her rage has only grown since the 2024 election. Hannah-Jones has been accusing President Trump of “erasing black history” — a laughable charge, given that Hannah-Jones knowingly distorts history in The 1619 Project and spin-off products, such as her picture book, where she asserts that “mommies” and “daddies” were “kidnapped” from Africa by white men.
Plus, President Trump has not been good for her (designer) pocketbook. The gigs that funded a lavish lifestyle seem to be fewer in number and flatlining at the fee she was earning back in 2020, the year after The 1619 Project first came out as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine. As I recounted in my book, Debunking The 1619 Project, given that Hannah-Jones was speaking an average of once every two weeks at public universities and earning $25,000 per appearance (often remotely due to Covid), her earnings from taxpayers amounted to about $650,000 in 2020.
Additionally, the Pulitzer Prize-winner was speaking at public libraries, events funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, educational organizations, and commemorations like Juneteenth, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and the 1921 Tulsa “massacre.” In January 2022, she made $55,000 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is not to mention her salary at The New York Times (a largely no-show job) then also as professor (Knight Chair of Race and Journalism) at Howard University beginning in 2021, and royalties and fees from the 1619 Project hardcover books, films, and other spin-off products.
Her gig as commencement speaker was interrupted this year, however, by “new federal pressures” that prompted Harvard University, and other institutions, to stop funding and providing facilities for “affinity” graduations for groups based on such aspects as race, ethnicity, and disability.
Hannah-Jones was a commencement speaker, but not at her usual center-stage space. She addressed black graduates in a conference room of the Marriot Hotel in Cambridge (the location apparently not revealed publicly until after the May 27 ceremony, which was organized by black Harvard undergraduates and alumni).
According to Harvard Magazine, Hannah-Jones noted that the graduating class had “entered college in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, during a ‘so-called racial reckoning.’” They had witnessed the reversal of promises to confront “legacies of racism,” including the laying off of “the team behind the Harvard Slavery Remembrance program” (the work outsourced to an outside company) and the renaming of the diversity office to the Office for Community and Campus Life. (We should take note of such strategies.)
Hannah-Jones inspired graduates with the accusation, “The same administration that has been cast as heroic for standing up to Trump over academic freedom caved almost immediately on issues of diversity and inclusion, and in doing so — in not standing up for y’all — it didn’t do one thing to stop Trump’s attacks on this university.”
“They gave you up for cheap,” she charged. “And I hope one day you will make them pay for that.”
The indignity of having to speak in a hotel conference room came on the heels of Hannah-Jones’ appearance at Oregon State University, Corvalis, on April 15. She was paid $25,000 for a 90-minute “conversation” in the “Consider This” series, $2,000 of which was paid by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. (It appears that $1,000 was added after the initial contract was signed for a total “section fee” of $26,000; Hannah-Jones’s agency, as in the past, did not return my phone call.)
The conversation was with Adam Davis, the executive director of Oregon Humanities, and held on campus.
Ten days after the event, Davis’ complaints about Trump’s funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which disperses funds to state agencies and means a loss of about forty percent of Oregon Humanities’ $2.5 million annual budget, appeared in an Oregon Business article. According to Davis, Oregon Humanities specializes in creating “opportunities for people to connect across differences of background and belief.” His conversation with Hannah-Jones “about history and race” was one.
Davis averred that the year 1619 was important, especially as “Oregon Humanities has been ramping up a whole set of activities to get people all around the state talking to each other about the meaning of the 250th anniversary” of the Declaration of Independence. For him, Hannah-Jones was vital to that mission. “She’s getting us thinking about how our country has been shaped and what we want our country to be” through “an origin story” — though “she’s all for people disagreeing with it.”
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
As evidenced by her Harvard affinity commencement address, Hannah-Jones stokes racial resentment and division. She is notorious for doxxing, blocking, and insulting even leftist historians who critique her work. She routinely calls Trump supporters “white supremacists.”
In response to my question about whether he had invited guests who “were critical of the claims in The 1619 Project,” Davis replied by email, “We’ve had speakers on a wide range of subjects from a wide range of perspectives, including, for example, Matt McCaw (the spokesperson for Greater Idaho) talking about borders, David French talking about polarization, and Father Greg Boyle talking about belonging. . . .”
It seems Davis had to go back in time to find such “conservatives” because the website reveals a decidedly leftist roster featuring individuals from the Obama administration and foundation.
To my question about how much money his organization had contributed for Hannah-Jones’s visit, he replied that they were “primarily a program partner.”
As we head toward our country’s semi-quincentennial, there is no reason that taxpayers should continue to support a millionaire’s fake “origin story.”
Not only did black Harvard undergraduates and alumni manage to organize a ceremony on their own, but apparently Oregonians were willing to pay up to $111 a head to the Oregon Historical Society to hear Hannah-Jones this past February. If they value her “origin story” so much, let them pay.