Top 70 Nikole Hannah-Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

2. “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.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

3. “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.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

4. “I wish now that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag. We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

5. “This is our national truth: America would not be America without the wealth from Black labor, without Black striving, Black ingenuity, Black resistance.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

6. “Even as a teenager, I understood that the absence of 1619 from mainstream history was intentional. People had made the choice not to teach us the significance of the year. And it followed that many other facts of history had been ignored or suppressed as well. What else hadn’t we been taught? I was starting to figure out that the histories we learn in school or, more casually, through popular culture, monuments, and political speeches rarely teach us the facts but only certain facts.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

7. “Lena Baker’s last words were “What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself.”83.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

8. “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.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

9. “In exposing our nation’s troubled roots, the 1619 Project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the unquestioned truth. It asks us to consider who sets and shapes our shared national memory and what and who gets left out. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David W. Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, our nation’s “glorious remembrance” is “all but overwhelmed by an even more glorious forgetting.”35.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

10. “As the historical sociologist Orlando Patterson once remarked, “The slave variant of capitalism is merely capitalism with its clothes off.”45.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

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

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

12. “Our myths have not served us well. We are the most unequal of the Western democracies. We incarcerate our citizens at the highest rates. We suffer the greatest income inequality. Americans’ life spans are shorter than those of the people in the nations we compare ourselves to.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

13. “In other words, we all suffer for the poor history we’ve been taught.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

14. “Inequality lives, in part, because Americans of every generation have been misled into believing that racial progress is inevitable and ongoing.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

15. “I am the American heartbreak – The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe – The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago. – Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak: 1619.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

16. “Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

17. “The smog created by our history of racial injustice is suffocating and toxic.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

18. “We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

19. “Sovereignty soldiers, Black refugees, self-abolitionists, fighting through America’s history, marooned in a land they made their own, acre after acre, plot after plot, war after war, life after life.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

20. “What else hadn’t we been taught?”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

21. “Peter H. Wood wrote in a 1999 paper on slavery and denial, “After all, as several eminent academics have recently reminded us, ‘nations need to control their national memory, because nations keep their shape by shaping their citizens’ understanding of the past.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

22. “James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

23. “Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak: 1619.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

24. “America has the lowest life expectancy, the highest incidence of chronic disease, and the highest rate of avoidable hospitalizations and avoidable deaths when compared to other high-income countries, despite spending more money on healthcare by far.2.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

25. “And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

26. “The police inveighed upon conservative California assemblyman David Donald “Don” Mulford to change the state’s gun laws to make the open carry of firearms illegal and, thus, undermine the Panthers’ community self-defense strategy.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

27. “In the decade following Nat Turner’s rebellion, as rural areas struggled to suppress the enslaved population, Southern cities concluded that the only way to protect their residents from uprisings in surrounding areas was to invest in armed patrols.60 In most urban areas, after establishing a city patrol, officials would also build a town jail and a punishment site, often referred to as “the cage,” where suspicious enslaved people could be incarcerated and tortured.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

28. “Black median household income in 1950 was about half that of white Americans, and today it remains so.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

29. “Garrison implied that it was “turbulent” Black behavior that drove racist reactions among white people who would otherwise hold Black people in “esteem,” an inversion of the true cause and effect of racism.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

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

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

31. “Americans in both the North and the South came to see slavery as a necessary evil, the only way to pay off their debts and build the new nation.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

32. “Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined. – Justice Hugo Black, 1964.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

33. “When it comes to race relations in the United States,” the study said, “most Americans hold an unyielding belief in a specific, optimistic narrative regarding racial progress that is robust to counterexamples: that society has come a very long way already and is moving rapidly and perhaps naturally toward full racial equality.”64.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

34. “What if America understood, finally, now, at the dawn of its fifth century, that we have never been the problem, but the solution?”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

35. “As Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1892 autobiography, “The story of the master never wanted for narrators. The masters, to tell their story, had at call all the talent and genius that wealth and influence could command. They have had their full day in court. Literature, theology, philosophy, law and learning have come willingly to their service, and if condemned, they have not been condemned unheard.” Our part, as Douglass said, “has been to tell the story of the slave.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

36. “Given the choice between parity with Black people – by inviting them into unified unions – and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

37. “The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just thirty-three, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came in part from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. So they also understood that abolition would have upended the economies of both the North and the South.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

38. “I wanted people to know the date 1619 and to contemplate what it means that slavery predates nearly every other institution in the United States.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

39. “In 1785, he led a delegation of abolitionists to Mount Vernon to convince the future first president of the United States to join their movement. But George Washington declined to sign the petition or publicly support the Methodists’ anti-slavery efforts, on the premise that “it would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

40. “Until Americans replace mythology with history, until Americans unveil and halt the progression of racism, an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

41. “If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire rationale for how this nation had allowed slavery would collapse.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

42. “Most church fellowships are more concerned about drinking or new buildings or Sunday closing than about children who die of rat bites or men who are killed because they want to be treated like men.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

43. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

44. “Black Americans who have consistently made the case, even when they were utterly disenfranchised and forced out of the political process, that all citizens deserve equal access to the benefits of a country founded on a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

45. “Slavery persisted, and grew, protected by the argument that it was going away.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

46. “America has a way of dancing with its own delusion.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

47. “The relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing of their bodies and the products of their forced labor would help make Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance, and trading sector, and New York City a financial capital of the world.13.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

48. “The story of Black America cannot be disentangled from the story of America, and our attempts to do so have forced us to tell ourselves a tale full of absences, evasions, and lies, one that fails to satisfactorily explain the society we live in and leaves us unable to become the society we want to be.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

49. “As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half-Black brother of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, born to her father and a woman he enslaved.16.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones

50. “Jefferson himself considered the people he enslaved in the coldest economic terms, saying he calculated that a “woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”51.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones