Excerpt from “The Idea of America” by Nikole Hannah-Jones
My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was
perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of
disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal
government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the
edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it
showed the slightest tatter.
So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man,
having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full
citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as
a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that
the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection
to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a
marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.
Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father
knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to
building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply
would not exist without us.
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans
landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to
form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates.
The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now
the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning
of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their
homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history
until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the
Middle Passage.
Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into
America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought
into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through back-breaking labor, they
cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the
cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all
American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson and James.
Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated
by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the
Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged
the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton
they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for
My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was
perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of
disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal
government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the
edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it
showed the slightest tatter.
So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man,
having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full
citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as
a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that
the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection
to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a
marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.
Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father
knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to
building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply
would not exist without us.
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans
landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to
form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates.
The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now
the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning
of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their
homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history
until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the
Middle Passage.
Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into
America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought
into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through back-breaking labor, they
cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the
cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all
American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson and James.
Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated
by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the
Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged
the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton
they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for
