August, 2019 marked 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of Virginia, and sold to colonists. Finding a way to commemorate a tragic and shameful part of history is hard, but Staff Writer Nikole Hannah-Jones convinced the New York Times Magazine to spend the year talking about that history, and about the lives of African Americans living in the U.S. today. It was kicked off with a dedicated issue filled with articles by more than a dozen prominent African American writers. Nikole Hannah-Jones joins In Focus to talk about the monumental task of putting “The 1619 Project” together. She’ll speak to the importance of telling the truth, now, about the attitudes that allowed slavery to flourish, like the belief that some people just deserved to be enslaved, translate into today’s growing and pervasive racism. Robert E. Cornegy, Jr. sits on the New York City Council, representing some of Brooklyn’s most prominent majority-Black neighborhoods. He’ll talk about the importance of remembering the history while protecting the here and now. As many of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods gentrify, those who built those neighborhoods are being pushed out. So how do you allow communities to grow and prosper while maintaining the culture of the people who built them?