In the Fall of 2019, the New York Times unveiled
the 1619 project, this kind of sprawling special issue
commemorating the 400th anniversary of the
year African slaves were first brought to
American shores. 1619 was the brainchild of
star journalist and MacArthur "Genius" Nikole
Hannah-Jones. It claimed to be this daring
deconstruction of America.
This anniversary is the reason we even exist
as a country.
We would not be the United States, were
it not for slavery.
You can look across all these aspects of modern
day society and see the legacy of slavery;
sugar, geography, capitalism, why there's
so much traffic in Atlanta. All of this kind
of goes back to that original sin.
1619 was a sensation, driving record subscription
numbers. It even got its own Superbowl commercial.
America was not yet America, but this was
the moment it began.
This new history rests on a radical revision
of America’s birth year. In the opening
essay, Hannah-Jones claimed that the Founding
Fathers had actually declared independence
to protect slavery.
We were founded not as a democracy, but as
a slaveocracy.
Oh yeah, your sixth grade history teacher
was a propagandist. Washington and Jefferson
broke off from British in order to protect
the practice of brutal human bondage. So what's
the evidence for this radical revision?
The project was based on recent scholarship
which has dramatically deepened our understanding
of this country's origins and our founding.
Thank you so much for inviting me to facilitate
this important conversation and get a group
of historians who really know their stuff.
Gerald Horne is the Moores Professor of History
at the University of Houston.
This is a book that seeks to puncture the
creation myth about the United States of America.
It was certainly a great leap forward for
white supremacy.
So this is our sturdy scholarly source, huh?
Professor Horne has some other opinions that
might make one ever so slightly skeptical
of his credibility. So you know Robert Mugabe,
the brutal African dictator who routinely
dispatched his North Korean-trained goon squads
to liquidate his political opponents? Horne
kinda has a soft spot for the guy.
Or Fidel Castro, the Cuban autocrat who oversaw
the mass imprisonment of undesirable political
elements like, you know, journalists and homosexuals?
Or the Soviet Union, the one that weaponized
famine to murder millions of Ukrainians? Horne
has said that even its victims would consider
the fall of the Soviet Union “a geopolitical
catastrophe.”
So the great New York Times, with all of its
prestige and reach, is laundering the crank
ravings of a fringe academic with a fetish
for authoritarian terror.
Y'all didn’t know it was going to get this
real huh?
Human bondage has been a feature of virtually
every civilization, of every possible color
combination. Those 20 people delivered to the
New World in 1619 were not, in fact, slaves.
They, like the vast majority of white people
coming here, were indentured servants. The
bulk of African slaves and servants were funneled
through a lucrative partnership between African
elites and European merchants. These unlucky
20 were full human beings, just as conscious
and alive as you or me. And their stories,
and their suffering, deserves to be told.
The Founders were the first to build a country
rejecting the ancient human hierarchies that
most people in most places had simply taken
for granted. The first anti-slavery meeting
in the history of human civilization takes
place in Philadelphia. Key framers denounced
slavery as an “abhorrence”, as “barbarism.”
This was in defiance of Britain,
which didn’t fully abolish slavery until
nearly 60 years after the revolution. “All
men are created equal.” We’ve become acclimated
to the majesty of that phrase. But back then
it represented a radical reimagining of human
relations, and the document it inspired empowered
the freedom struggles to come.
Most of the conservatives who have come out
against the project it's clear they haven't
read a single word of it. They're not calling
out the facts of it, they can't argue the
facts. They just don't like what it's saying.
That defense has not aged well. The 1619 project
has been pummeled by professional historians
on the Right and the Left. Including Gordon
Wood, the Grand Jedi Master of American Revolution
scholars.
You're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon
Wood.
It has the authority of the New York Times
behind it, and yet it could be so wrong in
so many ways.
The Times eventually offered up a fake correction,
that just some of founders wanted to protect
slavery.
And now it’s pumping this fake history into
schools, turning the 1619 project into an
educational curriculum.
The curriculum is actually being taught in
every state in the country, in more than 80
cities. Educators are willing to tear up how
they had planned their curriculum to teach
this.
If there was any justice in this world, Bob
Woodson would be at least as famous as Al
Sharpton. He's spent four decades pioneering
a practical black activism that actually improves
people's lives. He founded 1776 specifically
to counter the hip fatalism of the 1619 Project.
What 1619 postures is that all of
the problems facing inner city blacks are
attributed to factors that are external to
that community. Explain to me how institutional
racism could cause black people to fail in
systems run by their own people, tell me how
that works! Nothing is more lethal to a people
than to convey to them that it's impossible
for them to be agents of their own uplift.
Black America has exhibited, many of them,
a level of resilience; in the Bronzeville
section of Chicago, at a time of redlining,
in 1929 there was 731 black owned businesses.
Blacks controlled 100 million dollars is real
estate assets. When blacks were denied access
to hotels we built our own; the Waluhaje in
Atalanta, the Saint Charles in Chicago. Kids
in the inner city are inspired to improve
their lives when you give them victories that
are possible. There are two groups of people
that I am sick and tired of, that is self-flagellating
guilty white people and angry rich blacks.
