Gates Chili Central School District

On the eve of Black History Month, a group of Spartans heard from the creator of a project that has sparked many important conversations about American slavery and its repercussions during a special event honoring the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 20 Gates Chili High School students attended Expressions of King’s Legacy at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) on Jan. 31. The keynote speaker for  this year’s event was Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer  Prize-winning investigative journalist and the mind behind “The 1619 Project.”

In an interview-style talk conducted by veteran Rochester journalist Janet Lomax, Hannah-Jones discussed her career and the inception of the project. She explained that she got hooked on journalism while working on her high school newspaper and writing stories about students like her. Hannah-Jones, whose father is African American and mother is white, grew up in Waterloo, Iowa and was bussed to a nearly all-white school across town as part of a school desegregation program.

“I wanted to tell stories about Black folks and inequality, to force people to grapple with what I was dealing with: the perception of race — the thing we have not wanted to confront,” she told Lomax.

Hannah Jones credits a high school teacher with setting her on the path to becoming the journalist that she is. That teacher introduced her to “Before the Mayflower,” a 1962 book by Lerone Bennett Jr. that traces the history of Black America starting with the widely overlooked arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Colonial Virgina in 1619, which is referenced in the title of “The 1619 Project.” 

“There were things that happened that we were not being taught about. You cannot understand America if you do not understand the year 1619,” said Hannah-Jones.