After a year of increasingly petty spats with academics on Twitter and a significant correction after fact-checkers confirmed that a key thesis of the 1619 Project was erroneous, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the self-described “Beyonce of journalism,” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, for her piece, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”

“For a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution,” the Pulitzer Prize board said of Hannah-Jones’s introductory piece for the New York Times Magazine series.