Democracy should fit all of us
Our merch store opens to the public today. I first pitched the idea about six years ago, just a few weeks after The 19th’s website went live in August 2020. So much of those early days could have translated to merch, from a member quote in a reader email to a conversation-starting tote bag to some staff inside jokes.
Back then, I pictured your standard merch: T-shirts, hoodies and mugs with our logo. All of that would have been fine. But it would have been a souvenir of a newsroom that was only weeks old, one that didn’t yet know what it would become.
Honestly, I’m glad we waited. Because what’s in our store today could only have come from the newsroom we’ve grown into.
The 19th was born in the summer of 2020 amid a pandemic, a national reckoning on race, a high-stakes election and the 100th anniversary of the ratification of our namesake 19th Amendment.
The 19th Amendment promised women the vote. For millions of women, that promise came with fine print. Native American women weren’t recognized as citizens until 1924. Many Asian immigrant women were barred from citizenship for decades longer. Black women in the South faced poll taxes, literacy tests and violence at the polls until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The asterisk in our logo represents the unfinished business of the 19th Amendment: the women and LGBTQ+ people still shut out of our democracy by their gender, race, ethnicity, class or disability. They are the readers we report for every day.
So we kept them in mind as we built our merch and our storefront.
Our charcoal “Revolutionary” tee honors the names history left out, and the white “News That Represents” tee speaks to the 19th Amendment’s unfinished business. Our Declaration of Belonging art print is part of our answer to the country’s 250th birthday. For everyday use, our asterisk tumbler keeps your coffee hot through a long news day, and our embroidered trucker hat is made for council meetings and school pick-up lines. Our socks let you “represent” from the ground up. And the sticker pack carries slogans like “Courage is Contagious,” “News That Represents” and our asterisk, for anywhere you want to show your support for good journalism.
If we had launched in 2020, the store would have told you our name. This year’s launch asks the question we come back to every day: Who gets to be remembered as a revolutionary? At The 19th, the answer is all of us.
The store is now open at store.19thnews.org, and every purchase supports our nonprofit journalism. When you wear your 19th merch, tag us @19thnews; we can’t wait to see it out in the world.
Democracy should fit all of us.