The first edition appeared in a 100-page issue of The New York Times Magazine on August 14, 2019. It included ten written essays, a photo essay, and a collection of poems and fiction,[26] with an introduction by editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein,[17][27] as follows:
"America Wasn't a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One", essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones Conservatives: Everything below is shit because Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed one of the primary reasons some colonist joined the revolution was to preserve slavery.
"American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond
"How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today", essay by Linda Villarosa
"What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery", essay by Jamelle Bouie
"Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?", essay by Wesley Morris
"How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam", essay by Kevin Kruse
"Why Doesn't America Have Universal Healthcare? One Word: Race", essay by Jeneen Interlandi
"Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery", essay by Bryan Stevenson
"The Barbaric History of Sugar in America", essay by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
"How America's Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew: By Plunder", essay by Trymaine Lee
"Their Ancestors Were Enslaved by Law. Now They're Lawyers", photo essay by Djeneba Aduayom, with text from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Wadzanai Mhute
"A New Literary Timeline of African-American History", a collection of original poems and stories
Clint Smith on the Middle Passage
Yusef Komunyakaa on Crispus Attucks
Eve L. Ewing on Phillis Wheatley
Reginald Dwayne Betts on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
Barry Jenkins on Gabriel's Rebellion
Jesmyn Ward on the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
Tyehimba Jess on Black Seminoles
Darryl Pinckney on the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863
ZZ Packer on the New Orleans massacre of 1866
Yaa Gyasi on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
Jacqueline Woodson on Sgt. Isaac Woodard
Joshua Bennett on the Black Panther Party
Lynn Nottage on the birth of hip-hop
Kiese Laymon on the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition” speech
Clint Smith on the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina