As a part of “Banned Books Week,” a public Virginia library is hosting Nikole Hannah-Jones for a lecture. Hannah-Jones is known for developing the 1619 Project, which has been criticized as promoting critical race theory, being factually inaccurate, and lacking context.
The professor and author will lecture participants at Washington-Liberty High School Auditorium in Arlington on Sept. 20.
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“Join us for a lecture by author Nikole Hannah-Jones about her book ‘The 1619 Project’ and the freedom to read,” reads the Arlington Public Library’s website.
The library made a point of clarifying that despite the location, the public school system is not at all affiliated with the event.
“The animating idea of ‘The 1619 Project’ is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin,” the library describes Hannah-Jones’s work in part.
According to the Banned Books Week initiative’s website, “Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read.”
The campaign first started in 1982. “Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular,” the website continues.
According to the initiative, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is the most banned book. The book’s presence in school has been challenged for its illustrations of explicit sexual activity, which some have called pornographic. “Banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images,” reads the website.
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Hannah-Jones declined an offer of tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021 after a heated national dispute took place over the controversial author being tenured. She opted instead to join the faculty of Howard University, where she was named Knight chairwoman in race and journalism.
