Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones poses for a portrait at the headquarters of The Associated Press in New York, on Friday, Dec. 10, 2021.
(AP Photo/Robert Bumsted, File)/shutterstock

With the embattled President’s House and Independence Mall as a backdrop, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and educator Nikole Hannah-Jones spoke about the importance of history last Friday.

By Denise Clay-Murray

Last Thursday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Trump administration regarding the revisions it wants to make to the President’s House memorial on Independence Mall.

A three-judge panel ruled that the City of Philadelphia couldn’t prevent the administration from removing the panels that have been at the first memorial to the enslaved on Federal property at 6th and Market Streets and replace them with panels that revise this part of the story of President George Washington.

Monuments that tell the stories of traditionally marginalized communities have been targeted by this current administration as part of its initiative to “restore sanity” to American history.

But it’s also part of a much larger plan, according to Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the1619 Project. When a community’s history is targeted, the reason isn’t just about that knowledge, she said.

“Sometimes we treat the erasure of history as a frivolous thing or a small or insignificant thing, but we need to understand their racial history, because they intend to erase your rights,” she said. “I think that this administration thrives on chaos, on making us feel like there’s so many fronts for us to fight on that we don’t fight on any of them, but we still have things within our control, and where we have control, we’re obligated to do something.”

Jones and author, educator and founder of Art Sanctuary Lorene Cary talked about the power of history on the lawn of the Independence Visitors Center on Friday night. The discussion was part of the Juneteenth kickoff of Wawa Welcome America.

Much of the conversation centered on the impact of knowing one’s history can have on a society and what it will tolerate. It’s an important conversation to have, especially for marginalized communities who weren’t necessarily included when the Founding Fathers were handing out inalienable rights, Jones said.

It helps to know what is coming. And since the Black community has traditionally been America’s canary in the coal mine, making sure that its history — and by extension, it — is neutralized makes things easier for those with autocratic intentions, she said. If monuments like the President’s House, and to historical figures like Medgar Evers and Harriet Tubman are allowed to be whitewashed, the access to the blueprint that has been traditionally used to fight certain things will go with it, she said.

“Here’s a reason they started with the erasure of our history,” she said. “You have to erase that history to render us weak in the face of being able to decipher what they plan to do now. But if you learn that history, then you understand exactly what you’re seeing. We were never to be a multiracial democracy. Black Americans — Black people — were stolen from Africa to be labor — we were not to be citizens; we were not to vote. The idea of Republicanism is really that we don’t trust regular people to govern, that it should be a white landed gentry who decides our politics.”

“So, if you noticed in the last few years, you’ve seen Republicans who were supposed to be the main patriots, saying we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” Jones continued. “Now that’s a little very subtle shift, because most people would say we are a democratic republic. We’re both of those things. But what they’re actually saying is, as our country becomes more diverse, we don’t believe in one person, one vote. If we are going to be a country where we are outnumbered by people of color, then we actually want to be a republic where the white elite will maintain power, [and] they will decide our politics, and most people will never be able to exercise the franchise.”

Or at least that appears to be the plan. But it’s not inevitable. American democracy has only actually existed for 60 years, and a lot of people fought hard to make that happen.

So, it’s time for Americans to decide how they’re going to handle this, Jones said.

“I want us to be clear. We all have some power,” she said. “We come from a people who were not protected by a single law in this country, who did not have, as the Supreme Court said in Plessy v. Ferguson, [any] rights that a white man shall respect, and yet we are all the product of a struggle that gave us rights that nobody in our lineage ever had in the history of our country since 1619. How dare we lose it. So, every one of us better figure out what that thing is that you have power to do, and don’t wait until it’s too late, until the suffering makes it unbearable.

“If they were not afraid of us, they wouldn’t try to erase us.”