America@250: Nikole Hannah-Jones on Patriotism and Heroes
- Gina Greenlee, Author
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
This blog post excerpts the transcript of Alex Lovit interviewing Nikole Hannah-Jones in May 2026.
This interview is the conclusion of our three-part series called Democracy Under Construction. We’ve been commemorating America’s 250th by examining US history and asking where our patriotism should lie, who we should be lifting up as national heroes, and how history helps us find a path toward a more inclusive democracy. We didn’t even really become a democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
There are a lot of problems that limit and threaten our democracy today, including the Supreme Court’s current dismantling of that very same Voting Rights Act. So, what are we celebrating when we celebrate America? Should we even be celebrating? Is patriotism a problem?
There’s no one I’d rather ask those questions than my guest today. Nicole Hannah Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University and the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 project. The 1619 Project reframes our country’s history by putting slavery and its lasting consequences at the core of the American story. Black people often get left out of that story, but Nicole shows us the central role they played in shaping our nation.
Alex Levit: So, I want to ask you about patriotism. I’d like to be patriotic. I’d like to believe that my country stands for something. Democracy, equality, justice. This country is 250 years old now. So, for 250 years, people have been using patriotic symbols and rhetoric to argue for all sorts of things. Do you think patriotism has been a positive force in this country’s history?
Nikole: I suppose it would depend on who we’re defining as the patriots and how we’re defining patriotism. If we are considering Black Americans as the greatest democratizing force in the United States, then their patriotism certainly has been a force for good. The more mainstream version of patriotism has been a very exclusionary one. One that’s been built on a dangerous mythology that includes a deifying of our founders and therefore a deifying of our founding as some divine act. And that’s justified all sorts of terrible hypocrisies.
So, I wouldn’t say overall in the general sweep of history that patriotism has been a positive force, at least not for the values that I hold.
Alex: Talk to me about some of those positive patriots in American history. You mentioned that African-Americans have often been the truest Americans in terms of holding us to account for our values. Tell us a few of those stories. Who should we look up to as American patriots?
Nikole: I consider Frederick Douglass to be the greatest American this country has ever produced. And I think if you look at his example of patriotism, it is one of trying to force the country to live up to its own stated ideals of believing in expansive rights.
He was a man who not only was an abolitionist who believed in full equality for people regardless of race, he also was a suffragist. He believed that women should have full equality and the right to vote at a time where Black Americans were defining what birthright citizenship looked like and many White Americans were trying to exclude Asians as not being able to be assimilated into the United States.
Frederick Douglas fought for Asian immigrants to also be considered full citizens of this country with full rights. So, he was an exemplar of what someone who has a true love of country and a true belief in equality for all people and that this nation can contain all of our hopes and dreams. But that he constantly spoke truth to power even in moments where it had to have been deeply uncomfortable and his version of patriotism was to say our country is not been a great country. It has not been a country that has lived up to its own stated values but that it should, and it could.
Of course, another great patriot to me would be Ida B. Wells who I would place as [Douglass’s] female counterpart even though she was younger than him.
She was born right at the period of abolition. She also was a civil rights advocate. She fought for Black Americans to have rights. She fought for women’s rights. She fought against classist politics and had an expansive view of what freedom should look like.
We have lots of examples of people throughout history who were on the right side of almost every issue we can think of. But we seldom hold them up as the examples of what makes someone a patriot.
Or we would tend to treat someone like Frederick Douglass or Ida B. Wells as Black American heroes, but not as heroes that every American, if they actually believe in the values they say they do, should look up to.
Alex: So, I want to ask about exactly that. I am, and you may have noticed this, a White man, and I am a Frederick Douglass fan and an Ida Wells fan.
How do you think about what they have contributed to me? What do I owe to these figures?
Nikole: These are American heroes. So, when we talk about, for instance, the abolition of slavery, this was not a gift to Black Americans.
The abolition of slavery was forcing us to end our participation in one of the most barbaric enterprises in the history of mankind. It civilizes us. It allows us to have freedom as a society and that of course impacts everyone.
There’s a reason we try to downplay the role of slavery in the founding of our country as a foundational institution because it is shameful and we were, and we remain ashamed of that history. People who fought for his abolition fought to free the entire country from its involvement in our barbaric system. And if we look at something like the civil rights that Ida B. Wells fought for, it is primarily her campaign against lynching.
When we had lynch law, we had a lawless society. We had a society where anyone could be subject to extrajudicial violence. What made us an advanced civilized society was this idea of due process of a legal system that everyone had to adhere to and that benefited everyone.
We have to understand that’s why I frame Black Americans as a democratizing force. These efforts were not just about helping Black Americans achieve rights. They were about democratizing our country. They were about ensuring rights for all marginalized people but also ensuring rights of White men as long as slavery existed. That meant that there was no threshold for how you could exploit laborers. And so that also led to a lot of exploitation of poor White laborers.
It meant there was no threshold for violence. White men were also lynched. They weren’t lynched in the numbers that Black men were, but they were also subject to this type of violence. One thing we too often fail to understand is that when we allow a group to be marginalized and mistreated and to have their rights abridged, it also then fundamentally makes everyone else’s rights vulnerable.
So, I wish we would think about these efforts to perfect democracy and to bring equality into the constitution and into the law as benefiting all Americans.
When we think of White people as Americans, they are stand-in for all Americans. But when we think of Black people, we don’t think of them as a stand-in for all Americans even though my project points out that people of African descent have been here as long as people of European descent. They are just as fundamentally American if not more so than anyone else. So, it would do us well as a country to be able to see ourselves in that struggle because that struggle is a struggle to democratize this country.
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There’s a reason we try to downplay the role of slavery in the founding of our country as a foundational institution because it is shameful and we were, and we remain ashamed of that history. People who fought for his abolition fought to free the entire country from its involvement in our barbaric system… when we had lynch law, we had a lawless society. We had a society where anyone could be subject to extrajudicial violence. What made us an advanced civilized society was this idea of due process of a legal system that everyone had to adhere to and that benefited everyone. Nikole Hannah Jones
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The abolition of slavery was forcing [The United States] to end our participation in one of the most barbaric enterprises in the history of mankind. It civilizes us. It allows us to have freedom as a society and that of course impacts everyone. Nikole Hannah Jones
