Nikole Hannah-Jones wins Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project

AP | The Pulitzer Prize board on Monday awarded its prize for commentary to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times for an essay she wrote for ‘The 1619 Project’.

The project, which she helmed, marked the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans being brought to what became the United States of America and the impact it has had.

The board called her work a “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” and recognized its “prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.”

After the announcement that she had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones told the Times’ staff it was “the most important work of my life.”

While nearly impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or even sentences, Hannah-Jones’ essay was introduced with this headline: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote, “But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”