A couple of weeks back, I expressed a "what might have been" lamentation over The 1619 Project, which is a New York Times Magazine initiative created back in August 2019 to showcase the early and enduring role slavery played in the nation's development.
(The year 1619 is when the first ship carrying African slaves reached port in Virginia.)
Almost immediately, problems arose with the project, most of them stemming from either historical falsification or ideological extremism or both. The cardinal rule of teaching history is that it must be supported by historical fact. Leading with unsupported supposition threatened to tarnish the entire project.
Five historians wrote to Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein to say as much, and demand a correction, which was initially refused.
Those five historians--Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz and Gordon Wood--represent more than two centuries of study surrounding early American history. Their credentials not only add weight to their criticism, but also draw a stark contrast with revisionist journalists at the heart of The 1619 Project who let their political bias displace history.
After seven months, Silverstein and Nikole Hannah-Jones (the lead New York Times reporter for the project) issued a "clarification" to the phrase most challenged by the five historians and others. Instead of claiming as "fact" that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery," the text has been revised to read "... some of the colonists ..."
Adding an ambiguous "some of" seems a sloppy correction, especially for a reporter who seeks to "re-frame" the American founding with "slav-ocracy" as its core consideration.
A good journalist would want to know which colonists, and what proof. Particularly since Wood and others have argued that there's no evidence any colonist ever expressed protecting slavery as a primary reason for independence.
In all the wealth of literature chronicling the founding era--pamphlets, newspaper editorials, almanacks, letters, speeches, legislative records and resolutions, town meeting reports, notes on everything by everybody--the conspicuous absence of any definitive record demands removal of Hannah-Jones' entire paragraph, not just a mushy modification.
Indeed, this passage occurs later in the same paragraph, which essentially restates its unsupported opening claim: "... we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue."
What historical fact proves is precisely what undercuts Hannah-Jones' primary objective: Independence was a product of Enlightenment philosophy with revolutionary ideas about liberty and self-government in a new world. It wasn't race-driven or gender-driven, though it occurred in an age of endemic racism and sexism.
Rather than the start of a story of perpetual racial division, American independence began the more admirable tale of eventual racial unification--which over the course of centuries and a civil war would become a glowing global example of exceptional political accomplishment.
It is in this respect that Hannah-Jones most egregiously misses the mark, and for which numerous more "clarifications" are needed, but alas will never come.
Her specious claim that America was born bad, that "anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country," contradicts every notion of national self-determinism. She would argue the exact opposite against people who would believe lawlessness runs in the DNA of criminals.
But what's worse than misstating history from a factual standpoint is hijacking American ideals under the guise of "re-education" to promote a radical ideology.
When she wrote, "For the most part, black Americans fought back alone," she summed up a racially unbalanced account of civil rights efforts that "left most of the history out," as Civil War scholar McPherson remarked.
"Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best," she also wrote. But that's only a half-truth. Black people have also seen the best of America, over and over.
Generations of white Americans, from 1619 on, supported and struggled alongside blacks to oppose slavery, to abolish it, to fight and die in a Civil War, to attempt Reconstruction, to elect black lawmakers, to enact civil rights legislation, to jettison Jim Crow, to overturn Brown v. Board of Education, to allow interracial marriage, to improve race relations, and to twice elect a black president.
Unfortunately, those white Americans were too frequently in the minority, and oftentimes vilified. But to dismiss and disregard their fidelity to the spirit of equality for all, sometimes to the point of ultimate sacrifice, is disgraceful. It's a leading case-in-point of what Pulitzer-winning American Revolution historian Wood meant when he called The 1619 Project "so wrong in so many ways."
The right story and real moral of The 1619 Project is and should be an uplifting and unifying one: the most difficult, longest-coming and noteworthy social personification of E pluribus unum. "Out of many, one" can only be realized when the many work together, and the expansion of self-governing inclusivity for blacks and others in that "many" category is an ongoing, collective national achievement.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 03/27/2020