DALLAS — New York Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has become the face of the much-talked about the 1619 Project, happened to be in Sen. Ted Cruz’s home state Tuesday, the day he negatively cited her work during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing in D.C. for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Hannah-Jones spoke to a crowd of more than 600 people at Southern Methodist University’s McFarlin Auditorium for the keynote event of the annual Dallas Literary Festival.
She was asked how she felt about Cruz’s line of questioning from earlier that day. After initially being perplexed, she said, she decided she was proud to be named in the record of the historic confirmation hearing.
“It’s a badge of honor,” Hannah-Jones said, garnering a round of applause.
Jackson is the first Black woman nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, she’d also be the first former public defender to sit on the nation’s highest court.
Cruz, who ran for president in 2016 and is thought to be eying a 2024 run, cited the 1619 Project, which has been attacked by Republicans who reject the notion that America’s founding began not 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but in 1619 when slaves were first brought to the English colonies.
Cruz questioned Jackson about a speech she gave on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the University of Michigan law school in 2020, in which she referred to the 1619 Project and its author.
Cruz quoted Jackson as saying “the provocative thesis that the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be” and asked her if she agreed with Hannah-Jones that “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Jackson responded that much of her speech was about African American women and their contributions to the civil rights movement. She included a bit about Hannah-Jones, whose 1619 Project was recently published and fresh on people’s minds, as an example of more recent women who “have done things in our society.”
“I called it provocative. It is not something that I’ve studied. It doesn’t come up in my work,” she said.
Hannah-Jones said she wasn’t watching the confirmation hearing when people contacted her to say Cruz had named her and the 1619 Project. She didn’t understand what it had to do with the hearing.
But she said that she’s also become accustomed to hearing the project swung into political conversations, despite her belief that the work is not controversial. Though she authors only a few chapters of the project, which features essays from many writers, she recognizes she has become the face of the project.
She called the constant attacks over the past three years “surreal because it’s a work of journalism.”
Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer for Commentary for the 1619 Project.
“I got into journalism because I wanted to tell another story. And I didn’t feel like I saw myself and my people in the story, that Black communities were being represented in the way that we deserve,” Hannah-Jones said. “But I didn’t get into journalism to make powerful people comfortable.”
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