A Manhattan High School Reframes How Slavery Is Taught Using The New York Times’s 1619 Project

Jeremias Mata started his junior year thinking he’d already learned everything he needed to know about slavery.

“When I found out I was going to learn about slavery [this year], I was like, ‘Urgh … again?’” said Mata, 16, sitting in his 11th-grade history class at the Facing History School in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Over time, he’d connected slavery with hopelessness and a certain simplicity — that many black people had once been slaves, and that was that.

“But when we got into it” this year, he continued, “it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about.”

Part of what’s making this year’s lessons novel for students like Mata is an addition to the school’s history curriculum: The New York Times’s 1619 Project — a compilation of essays and poetry, penned almost entirely by black authors, that re-examines slavery’s legacy in the U.S. 400 years after the first enslaved people arrived here from West Africa.

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Editor Notes: The author of the 1619 project will be speaking at the T1W conference...