Why 'The 1619 Project' creator is 'proud' to have 'enemies' in Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis

When "The 1619 Project" was released three-and-a-half years ago, the ambitious reexamination of American history sparked difficult conversations about the legacy of slavery in the United States and earned praise for its creator, New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones.

It also provoked a fierce, if predictable, backlash from critics, many of whom were threatened by its central thesis: that the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia 400 years ago was a defining moment — perhaps the defining moment — in the history of the United States, one that continues to have a real and frequently devastating effect on Black Americans today.

"The 1619 Project," which was first published as a collection of essays in the New York Times Magazine, then adapted into a podcast and a book, also attracted attention from Hollywood producers interested in making it into a documentary.

Though she hadn't originally imagined this possibility, Hannah-Jones has always been an enthusiastic consumer of historical documentaries and understood the power of bringing the multimedia project to a wider audience. In particular, "Eyes on the Prize," the landmark 14-part series about the civil rights movement, "was transformative for me," she says in a video chat from her Brooklyn apartment. "I can't tell you how many times I watched that documentary."

"The 1619 Project" has now arrived on Hulu as a docuseries, and while