Teaching 1619: Seven Years Later

Posted by Pulitzer Center on September 1, 2026

August 2026 marks seven years since The 1619 Project was first published, and seven years of our role in amplifying its resources to students and educators as the Project’s official education partner. Join us in taking a look back at the learning and impact this work has inspired.

The original guides in our first resource collection—accessed by over 1 million people within the first five years of publication—introduced the Project’s materials and offered guides for educators as they navigated the Project itself and its accompanying resources, including books, a podcast, and an Emmy Award-winning docuseries. We also provided teaching tips for educators working with these materials, and shared how elements of the project might be utilized in your teaching and learning goals.

Just over a year after the Project was initially published, we launched our first grant program to engage networks of U.S. educators and school administrators in an exploration of how the Project resources and themes connect to educators’ curricula. The first 1619 Education Network program launched in April 2021 and provided a foundation that has informed over a dozen grant and professional development programs.

Five years ago, we shared our first impact report to share how the themes and resources from the Project have created tangible impact in schools and communities across the country and around the world, and how our programming has supported that extended reach. We also celebrated this anniversary with a video that featured clips from past 1619 events, testimonials from our educator partners, and a special message to educators from The 1619 Project creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

In this report, we also introduced the 1619 Impact Grant to fund innovative and creative projects that engage students and teachers in their community with the content and themes of The 1619 Project beyond the individual classroom level. Since then, these grantees have analyzed equity in higher education spaces, developed performances, lectures, and visual art that capture the intersection of African American and Appalachian histories, created a Black Arts District to discover how art can help preserve history, and provided many more opportunities for communities to connect to the Project and to each other.

The 1619 Project Network teams and 1619 Impact grantees have also contributed to how we can meaningfully teach about the legacy of enslavement by creating digital curricular resources (available to explore and download for free in the lesson library) that empower students to engage with complex histories.

As this work has expanded, so has our gratitude for the community of education professionals that fuel it. These professionals come from a range of backgrounds and educational contexts, from kindergartens to universities, after-school programs, and community organizations.

If you want to stay up-to-date on the incredible work our educator partners are doing, receive information about 1619 programs and opportunities, and read the latest Pulitzer Center-supported reporting on racial justice, you can subscribe to the monthly 1619 Education newsletter here.

We hope you can join us in celebrating this journey from 2019 to 2026 and explore the 1619 Education website to dive deeper into this archive of what it means to be teaching 1619.