| Introduction Amid a tense moment in racial relations, an ambitious — and controversial — journalistic endeavor known as The 1619 Project places slavery at the center of U.S. history. The goal, wrote the editors at The New York Times Magazine, which commissioned and published the project, is to chronicle slavery's impact on capitalism, education, health care and many other American institutions. Defenders of the project say it will help heal long-festering wounds by educating Americans about systemic racism and the true role of slavery in the nation's founding and development. But conservative critics deride the effort as left-wing propaganda and say the project threatens an origin story told for generations. Many historians, meanwhile, praise The 1619 Project but say it excludes other historical factors and contains some errors, such as stating that the colonists fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery. They hope the controversy over the project will raise public consciousness about slavery's legacy and evoke fresh questions about how to teach history. 
At a 2019 ceremony at Hampton, Va., marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved people in what became the United States, participants toss flower petals into the water to honor Africans who died at sea during the Atlantic crossing. (Getty Images/Zach Gibson) | Go to top Overview On a Thursday morning in August 2019, scores of people made a pilgrimage to The New York Times building at 40th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan. There, they waited in lines that ran up the block, drawn by a most unusual giveaway. The prize was a modern-day relic: a printed copy of The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine. The fact that people would line up in the summer heat to obtain a paper copy of material available online for free is a testament to the impact wrought by the prize-winning collection of essays, art, fiction and poetry about slavery in America. The 1619 Project was ambitious by almost any standard — an attempt to recast American history through the lens of slavery, focusing on the role it played from the country's colonial beginnings to its ascent as a global superpower in the 20th century. 
New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones conceived of The 1619 Project (right) and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for an essay she wrote as part of the project. “We created powerful journalism that caused people to think and to argue and to question,” Hannah-Jones said. (Getty Images/Mike Coppola/Chicago Tribune/Raquel Zaldivar) | “The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation's birth year,” wrote Jake Silverstein, editor in chief of The Times Magazine, in December 2019. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” The project shone a spotlight on slavery, referring to plantations, including Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia, as forced labor camps. It called post-Civil War America, with its Jim Crow segregation, an “apartheid state” because of a rigid racial caste system. It labeled as hypocritical the assertion in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal.” And it argued that the legacy of slavery and racial segregation infects nearly every aspect of American life, from the tone of the nation's capitalism to its systems of justice, education and health care that struggle to treat Americans equally. Such depictions have won praise from some historians, academics and educators. “I think the whole project was brilliant,” says historian Kate Clifford Larson, author of a biography of Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery to become a famed 19th-century abolitionist. “When I look back on the impact that it had, the discussions that were sparked because of it, I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that it would have, in my view, moved the needle.” 
Because of the existence of slavery, The 1619 Project labeled as hypocritical the Declaration of Independence, which the Continental Congress approved on July 4, 1776, and its assertion “that all men are created equal.” (Getty Images/Universal Images Group/Christophel Fine Art/Contributor) | But many conservatives see the project as an attack on American values. While one Republican senator went so far as to introduce legislation discouraging its use in schools, the loudest criticism came from the White House. The Trump administration disputed the existence of systemic racism, the term many use for the collective impact of more than a century of discriminatory practices. In a September speech at the National Archives, then-President Donald Trump derided The 1619 Project as “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison.” “The Left has warped, distorted and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods and lies,” Trump said. “There is no better example than The New York Times' totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.” And some historians, while supportive overall of The Times' effort, have pointed out what they see as inaccuracies with The 1619 Project. The controversy over the project comes at a tense moment in U.S. history. Predating its publication were polarizing debates over Confederate monuments, U.S. immigration policy and the behavior of a president who critics say encouraged white supremacy. The largest protests for racial justice in American history, ignited by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, came just months after its publication and would be followed by a heated presidential election in which race was a central issue. Defenders of The 1619 Project say they hope it will improve the racial climate by educating Americans about systemic racism and the true role of slavery in America's founding; critics say the opposite will happen because the project threatens an origin story told for generations and held dear by millions of Americans. Many historians, meanwhile, hope the controversy will raise public consciousness about the role of slavery in today's society. They also welcome the debate over how the nation should teach history. The project was published on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on North American soil in 1619. The 20 to 30 men and women brought to Virginia and traded for food and supplies were not the first to be enslaved on the continent, but most historians acknowledge the date as the birth of slavery in what would become the United States. By 1860, that system would include some 4 million enslaved people, who enabled the South to become an agricultural powerhouse and who helped build everything from the U.S. Capitol to Monticello. According to one estimate, the nation benefited from 222.5 million hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865. “This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin,” Silverstein wrote of the Africans' arrival in 1619, “but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin.” 
A boy uses the “colored” water fountain at the county courthouse in Halifax, N.C., in 1938. The segregation of water fountains and other public facilities permeated the Southern landscape in the decades after slavery was abolished. (Getty Images/FPG/John Vacha) | Silverstein continued: “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776.” Alexandria Neason, a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review, praised the project as “an attempt to guide readers not just toward a richer understanding of today's racial dilemmas, but to tell them the truth. For many, it may be the first time they've heard it.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times Magazine staff writer who conceived of the project, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2020 for her essay. But some historians take issue with the project's approach. “Topically, it brings up a series of issues that are entirely worth giving historical attention [to],” says Phillip Magness, a political and economic historian who wrote a book critiquing the project. “I've said many times that this is subject matter we need to be investigating. Where it goes astray … is that it then filters all of those subjects through a heavily political lens.” He adds: “Politicized history is often not very good history. It means setting aside nuance and detail and political facts that conflict with a narrative.” James Oakes, an historian of slavery and the Humanities Chair at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, says the project left him “upset and disappointed,” largely because it focused on race to the exclusion of other important historical factors. “For those of us who have spent our lives struggling to understand the interaction of all this, the reduction of everything to race and racism makes all of history into a mono-causal explanation,” he says. Oakes says the project did not do enough to acknowledge those white Americans who were committed to the abolition of slavery and to racial equality. “We have a history too,” he says, “and The 1619 Project erases us from history.” Other historians say the project contains factual mistakes. A single passage has especially drawn their ire: the assertion that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. Five well-known historians, including Oakes, wrote a letter to The Times applauding the project but taking issue with this and other elements. “The project asserts that the founders declared the colonies' independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue,’” they wrote. “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding.” One thing is beyond dispute: The 1619 Project ignited an intense debate about how schools should teach history. (See Short Feature.) Only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, according to a 2017 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And only 32 percent knew slavery was an institution designed to generate profits for slaveholders. Teachers who taught K-12 did better than students on some questions but did not score much higher on others. The concepts' phrasing was tightened for brevity; the full wording can be found in the “Teaching Hard History” report. Source: Kate Shuster, “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Jan. 31, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/uf9684x4 Data for the graphic are as follows: | Concept | Percentage of Teachers | Percentage of Students | | Slavery existed in all European North American colonies. | 53% | 52% | | Slavery was central to the economy across North America. | 58% | 46% | | Slavery was protected in U.S. founding documents, and enslavers dominated the federal government from 1787 to 1860. | 52% | 22% | | Slavery was an institution to create profit for slaveholders and break the enslaved's will. | 71% | 32% | | Enslaved people resisted efforts to reduce them to commodities. | 60% | 49% | | Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. | 64% | 8% | | Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race. | 50% | 39% | In September, in response to the project and the broader push for racial justice, the Trump administration appointed what it called the 1776 Commission to recommend ways to teach “patriotic education” that would counter what it said was left-wing indoctrination. On Martin Luther King Day, the panel issued its report, which defended the founders who owned slaves and attacked the ideologies of liberalism and Progressivism. Historians and others harshly condemned the report, and President Biden removed it from the White House website on his first day in office. The 1776 Commission report was “a hack job. It's not a work of history,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, the largest group representing historians. “It's a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.” Karin Wulf, a history professor at the College of William & Mary and executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Va., says history classes should teach students how to think and to bring a critical eye to the past. “Kids should be encouraged to read lots of things and not be encouraged to read anything as dogma,” she says. Go to top Background The Project's Origins Like so many magazine stories, The 1619 Project began with a pitch. The Times' Hannah-Jones proposed in January 2019 that her news organization explore how slavery continues to shape the United States. It would be timed to the anniversary of the first enslaved Africans landing in North America in 1619. The editors who run the magazine embraced the vision. “It was an opportunity for us to do something that was necessary,” Silverstein said. The team invited 18 scholars and historians to a meeting to discuss the idea, brainstorm material and begin carving up assignments. Almost every contributor to the project was African American. As The 1619 Project took shape, it began to grow in scope. What was ultimately published included a special edition of the magazine with a dozen essays; a broadsheet section in The Times; 17 literary works, including poems and fiction; unique photography and art and a multipart podcast. The Times collaborated with the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington to create a history of slavery keyed to historical exhibits in the museum. Mary Elliott, the museum's curator of American slavery, and Jazmine Hughes, a writer and editor at the magazine, collaborated on the piece. The Times also partnered with the Pulitzer Center to create educational materials that allow for the use of The 1619 Project in classrooms. (The center, which awards grants to journalists, is not affiliated with the organization that awards the Pulitzer Prizes.) The materials include a lesson plan, reading guide, flashcards, activities and video. 
Laborers work in a Georgia cotton field in 1907. The exploitation of Black workers continued after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, part of what one 1619 Project essayist called “low-road capitalism” — a system in which wages are depressed and punishment, rather than reward, is used to motivate workers. (Getty Images/Universal Images Group/Photo 12/Contributor) | As in all major projects, a great deal of editing was involved. Hannah-Jones said that the original draft of her essay, which served as an introduction to the project, was 16,000 words, about twice as long as what would be published. After the editing, what was left was a powerful collection of essays by an expert group of authors that seeks to connect the United States' current problems to its racist past: Matthew Desmond, a sociology professor at Princeton University, wrote that “historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America's low-road approach to capitalism.” He defined low-road capitalism as a system in which wages are depressed and punishment, rather than reward, is used to motivate workers. Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton, argued that even modern traffic jams in Atlanta can be traced to segregation: Municipal planning and banking practices “pushed [Black Americans] into ghettoes,” he wrote, and the highway system encouraged white flight from city centers. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, linked America's sugar addiction to slave labor. Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that works to end mass incarceration, traced to slavery the roots of a U.S. prison population that grew from less than 300,000 in the early 1970s to more than 2.2 million in 2019. Adam Pendleton and other artists contributed original work, as did photographers Djeneba Aduayom and Dannielle Bowman, novelist Jesmyn Ward, film director Barry Jenkins and playwright Lynn Nottage. “We created powerful journalism that caused people to think and to argue and to question,” Hannah-Jones said. “And whether you ultimately come away agreeing or disagreeing with our argument, you can't engage with it in good faith and not be challenged to examine the narrative of what our country is.” Go to top Current Situation The Project in the Classroom In July, almost a year after The 1619 Project was published, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced a bill that would reduce federal funding to schools that use the project to help teach American history. “The 1619 Project is left-wing propaganda,” Cotton said. “It's revisionist history at its worst.” The legislation did not go anywhere in the 116th Congress, and it is unlikely to do so now with the House and Senate under Democratic control, but it underlines the backlash that has developed as educators embrace the project and the goal of teaching a more accurate view of slavery. From the beginning, The New York Times envisioned The 1619 Project as a teaching tool, as reflected in its partnership with the Pulitzer Center to create educational materials. In its annual report, the center said that tens of thousands of students have engaged those materials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. School districts in five major cities — Buffalo, N.Y., Chicago, Washington, Wilmington, Del., and Winston-Salem, N.C. — have adopted The 1619 Project as part of their curriculum. While some academics have been critical of The 1619 Project, others argue that while not perfect, the project has a place in classrooms. “The 1619 Project asks us to make connections between the past and the present,” says Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University. “In many cases, we accept history without thinking. The 1619 Project asked us to think.” Harris, who helped fact-check the project, was critical of language arguing that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. She recommended its removal and The Times ultimately declined to do so. But she says she supports the project overall, including its use in classrooms. “It's a really important intervention into our public life, broadly written,” Harris says. 
President Donald Trump speaks during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives in Washington on Sept. 17, where he derided The 1619 Project as “toxic propaganda.” (AFP/Getty Images/Saul Loeb) | That effort has generated intense criticism from Republicans, led by Trump, who repeatedly condemned The New York Times in general and The 1619 Project in particular. This criticism culminated in the release of the 1776 Commission report in January. In his final days in office, Trump also issued an executive order to create a national sculpture garden to honor American heroes. The list ranged from George Washington and civil rights icon Rosa Parks to author Mark Twain and basketball superstar Kobe Bryant. Historians say the 1776 report gives a selective and uncritical account of American history. Of slavery, for example, the report's authors wrote, “The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn't believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.” Historian Michael Kazin condemned the report. “This simple, quasi-theological way of understanding the past harks back to the 19th century, before history became a real academic discipline,” he wrote. “There is nothing wrong with venerating allegedly timeless values, but that is a task for preachers and ceremonial orators — not historians.” Biden Administration As the 2020 election neared, polls showed that voters were more dissatisfied with race relations in the United States than they had been in the previous 20 years. Even before his election, Biden, a Democrat, said the country needed to address its racial climate. “We can't leave this moment thinking we can once again turn away and do nothing,” Biden said in June, as millions of Americans were protesting Floyd's killing. “We can't. The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism. To deal with the growing economic inequality in our nation. And to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation to so many.” As president, Biden has promised a full slate of reforms, many of which require legislation, aimed at increasing opportunities for Americans of color. Among them are increasing capital available to minority-owned businesses; providing tax credits to first-time homebuyers; increasing the amount of low-income housing available; and making myriad other changes through government programs. Democrats also hope to make major changes to police procedures and U.S. immigration policy, and Biden has a full education agenda that includes raising teacher salaries, increasing faculty diversity and investing in physical infrastructure. The Department of Education is expected to focus on its oversight role when it comes to civil rights and diversity. The share of all U.S. adults dissatisfied with the treatment of Black Americans grew from 37 percent in 2001 to 65 percent in 2020, but dissatisfaction among African Americans has been consistently higher than among whites, according to a Gallup survey. The dissatisfaction has risen most sharply since 2014, when a police officer killed an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., triggering an ongoing movement highlighting racial injustice. Source: “Race Relations,” Gallup, accessed Feb. 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/ueswx8sf Data for the graphic are as follows: | Year | Percentage of All Adults | Percentage of Black Adults | Percentage of White Adults | | 2001 | 37% | 60% | 34% | | 2002 | 33% | 55% | 29% | | 2003 | 34% | 59% | 30% | | 2005 | 37% | 58% | 31% | | 2006 | 36% | 62% | 31% | | 2007 | 33% | 68% | 24% | | 2008 | 39% | 64% | 34% | | 2013 | 36% | 52% | 33% | | 2015 | 50% | 67% | 45% | | 2016 | 47% | 67% | 43% | | 2018 | 54% | 80% | 48% | | 2020 | 65% | 79% | 59% | Peniel Joseph, a history professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, urges Biden to create a commission on the nation's racial problems. Its mandate would include criminal justice reform, as well as policies on the minimum wage, housing and more, he said. It would also focus on American history. “It is past time for national leadership that helps us clearly establish our past in all of its complexity,” Joseph wrote for CNN. “Understanding, for instance, racial slavery's expansive reach — North and South — into the creation of American capitalism gives students, citizens and leaders a more holistic appreciation of the stubborn afterlife of structural racism. The stickiness of America's current racial divide is rooted in a history that we continue to distort, gloss over or ignore at our … nation's peril.” Go to top Outlook “Touched a Nerve” Can a renewed focus on slavery and its role in America's origin improve today's racial climate? It is a question raised directly by The 1619 Project, yet there is no consensus among academics — and much passionate opinion. Harris, of Northwestern University, argues the project will assuredly have an impact and that it was a logical progression in a decade marked by an examination of the role that race plays in the United States. “People thought the question of race was overblown or settled,” she says. “The last decade raised that question for people. For some people, it was really an eye-opener. This decade led a lot of people to wonder why this is worse than we thought, not better. For some, that led to questions about history.” The 1619 Project, Harris says, “touched a nerve about what we are experiencing. It will have an impact because people are asking more questions than they ever have.” Others say The 1619 Project, and its focus on slavery, has hurt race relations. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, says its characterization of America's beginnings is harmful. “A project that aims at stoking racial division and animus does not move us toward such a wholesome version of equality before the law and recognition of one another's basic humanity,” says Wood, who wrote the book 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. Many say it is the debate, rather than any one argument, that is healthy. “I love that it caused a conversation back and forth,” says historian Larson. “This is what historians dream about. It empowered people.” Go to top Pro/Con Pro
Doctoral Candidate in U.S. History, University of Connecticut. Written for CQ Researcher, February 2021 | Slavery undoubtedly continues to drive the nation's racial divide. To see evidence of this continued impact, we need only to look back as far as Jan. 6. Staging a violent insurrection against the U.S. government, domestic terrorists forced their way into the Capitol building in an attempt to subvert the democratic process. Among the many offensive symbols displayed in the crowd, perhaps the most recognizable was the Confederate flag, brandished by a rioter outside the Senate chamber. Long a symbol of violence, white supremacy and treason, the Confederate flag was waved within the Capitol in front of paintings of the very men who fought to end slavery 160 years ago. The end of the Civil War, although resulting in the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, initiated a battle over the meaning of the reunified United States. Despite the efforts of Radical Republicans who sought to codify civil rights and eradicate systems of inequality during Reconstruction, the nation quickly abandoned any commitment to the formerly enslaved. Campaigns by organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy not only justified and reinforced the terror of Jim Crow but also shifted national memory away from the horrors of slavery. Racialized terror by the Ku Klux Klan and others led to the lynchings of several thousand Black Americans. The civil rights movement that was embarked upon in the 1950s and 1960s, seeking economic, political, legal and social rights for African Americans, is still unfinished. As a country, we have yet to fully grapple with the more than 400 years of human violation that have shaped our economic, legal and social systems. The racism fostered, nurtured and sustained by the institution of slavery is indelibly marked upon American society. The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionally ravaged communities of color, revealing inequities in housing, food security and health care along racial lines. Police brutality continues to result in the mass incarceration and economic burdening of Black communities, as well as the murder of innocent Black civilians. Fearmongering and scapegoating within Congress in response to the peaceful protests of the #BlackLivesMatter movement demonstrate that many politicians refuse to acknowledge the impact of systemic racism in American society. The presence of the Confederate flag in the Capitol was merely a symptom of deeply entrenched inequalities. Only by acknowledging the history of slavery in America, and our complicity with its continued impact, can the United States begin to address and make reparations for its racial divide. | Con
President, National Association of Scholars. Written for CQ Researcher, February 2021 | The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States passed Congress on Jan. 31, 1865. At least six generations have been born in the United States without the institution. A child born today who had an ancestor born into slavery in the United States is likely to have no closer connection than a great-great-great-grandfather. How likely is it that slavery has echoes through that many generations? Let's focus on slavery per se, not the memory of slavery kept alive in family traditions or manufactured through contemporary media. Slavery was an abomination. It took more than 100 years of effort by abolitionists and a ghastly war to end it forever on our shores. Moreover, emancipation did not instantly cure the ills of slavery. Many of the 3.9 million former slaves were illiterate; few held much property or other wealth; and nearly all bore the psychological scars of bondage. Some of those scars were indeed passed along to the next generation. Let's allow that, in principle, the chain of intergenerational trauma could extend six generations or more. In principle — but does it really? By 1900, a generation born after the Civil War was in its mid-30s, and it was busy taking ownership of the possibilities of American freedom. The great migration to northern cities had begun. Jim Crow laws and violent racial oppression were despicable, but Black Americans were learning to fight back — by organizing, moving, educating, building businesses and sustaining a robust cultural life. Alliances with civil rights-minded whites were flourishing. In the first decades of the 20th century, Black theater, movies and civic life defied racial barriers. Black family life became the center of what could genuinely be called a nationwide Black community that was on the path — a rocky path to be sure — to full legal and social equality. Asked then if slavery was still causing racial division in the United States, the self-evident answer was no. Racism was causing division, and slavery was receding into a distant historical past. One can always hunt for chains of causation that link to long-ago injustices and harms. There is, in fact, some psychological satisfaction in blaming the long-ago for the unhappiness of now. But there are much more recent social and economic causes of our current racial divide. My list would include mass immigration, the breakdown of the two-parent Black family, drugs and the war on drugs, politically encouraged economic dependency and ideology that fosters a victim mentality. | Go to top
Chronology
| | | | 1600s–1800s | Slavery and its aftermath shapes U.S. society. | | 1619 | A European ship delivers the first enslaved Africans to Virginia. | | 1776 | Continental Congress approves language in the Declaration of Independence stating “that all men are created equal.” | | 1787 | At the Constitutional Convention, the Framers do not restrict slavery but end the importation of Africans after 1808. In the “three-fifths compromise,” they classify each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning members to the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. | | 1793 | Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin, a machine that removes seeds from cotton. The invention increases the profitability of cotton plantations and leads to an expansion of slavery in the South. | | 1860 | Abraham Lincoln, who opposes slavery's expansion, wins the presidency. Seven Southern states secede from the Union to protect slavery. | | 1861 | As the Civil War begins, the U.S. population of enslaved people stands at about 4 million. | | 1863 | Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing roughly 3 million Black Americans enslaved in Confederate states. | | 1865 | With the Confederacy's defeat, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution is passed by Congress and ratified by the states, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. | | 1877 | The North's attempt to help formerly enslaved people, known as Reconstruction, ends amid resistance from Southerners. Southern states begin passing “Jim Crow” laws that segregate public spaces, limit Black job opportunities, suppress Black voting, obstruct educational opportunity and deny equal rights to African Americans. | | 1896 | In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that segregation is constitutional under the “separate but equal” doctrine. | | 1900s–1960s | Civil rights movement takes on Jim Crow laws. | | 1954 | The Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, overturning the Plessy decision. | | 1963 | The March on Washington brings 250,000 people to the nation's capital, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous “I have a dream” speech. The civil rights movement picks up in intensity. | | 1964 | The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on color, race, gender, religion or national origin. | | 1965 | Much of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns during rioting ignited by African Americans' anger over the arrest of a Black motorist and other grievances. Violent unrest over racial injustice grips the country throughout much of the 1960s and into the 1970s. | | 1968 | King, who had called for nonviolent protest, is assassinated. | | 1970s–Present | Police killings, racial protests and The 1619 Project bring racial justice issues to the fore. | | 1974 | U.S. awards $10 million to victims of the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which government doctors failed to treat 399 black men who had syphilis. | | 1991 | A bystander captures on video the beating of Black motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles police, one of many police actions that would galvanize the public and raise complaints about systemic racism in law enforcement. | | 2001 | The United Nations calls slavery and the slave trade crimes against humanity. | | 2009 | Barack Obama becomes the nation's first African American president. | | 2012 | Trayvon Martin, an African American teenager in Florida, is shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman. A year later, the Black Lives Matter movement is founded when the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is used on social media to protest Zimmerman's acquittal on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges stemming from Martin's death. | | 2014 | Protests break out in Ferguson, Mo., after a white police officer shoots and kills Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American, and a grand jury declines to charge the officer. | | 2019 | The New York Times Magazine publishes The 1619 Project, which places slavery at the center of U.S. history. The project ignites heated debate over the role of slavery in the United States. Some historians cite historical inaccuracies. Many conservatives, including President Donald Trump, attack the project, calling it anti-American. | | 2020 | The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis is captured on video, igniting what is likely the largest protest movement in American history. Between 15 million and 26 million people attend protests in hundreds of events nationwide…. The lead essay in The 1619 Project wins the Pulitzer Prize for commentary…. Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins the presidential election…. The 1776 Commission is created by the Trump administration to further “patriotic education” in American schools. | | 2021 | The 1776 Commission releases its report days before Biden's inauguration. Biden removes the report from the White House website upon taking office (January). | | | | Go to top Short Features In a 2017 survey, 92 percent of U.S. high school seniors could not identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Two-thirds were unaware that a constitutional amendment was required to end slavery throughout the United States. Less than a quarter could explain how the Constitution advantaged slaveholders. “If we are to understand the world today, we must understand slavery's history and continuing impact,” said the group that commissioned the survey, the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a report called “Teaching Hard History.” It warned that “our schools are failing to teach the hard history of African enslavement.” The 1619 Project published by The New York Times in 2019 reignited a debate — often fiery — over the role of slavery in American history and how that history should be taught in U.S. schools. From the start, the project, which places slavery at the center of U.S. history, was designed as a teaching tool. In partnership with the Pulitzer Center — an organization that awards grants to journalism projects but is not connected to the annual Pulitzer Prizes — The Times released educational materials created from the project, and school districts in five cities — Buffalo, N.Y., Chicago, Washington, Wilmington, Del., and Winston-Salem, N.C. — have adopted The 1619 Project as part of their curriculum. Many historians agree that The 1619 Project is well suited for use in education. “The project is a wonderful resource,” says Robert Johnston, director of the Teaching of History Program at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “It raises questions that you really want students thinking about. It raises the big themes that we really should care about.” The idea that the project raises large and provocative questions is precisely what many academics like about it. 
Gregory Brown, a teacher and mentor at Charles Herbert Flowers High School in Springdale, Md., works with ninth grader Darnell Dupar in 2014 during a history class. The 1619 Project seeks to recast how American history is taught. (Getty Images/The Washington Post/Mark Gail) | “As a teacher, that's a classic pedagogical method to get people to think about a topic freshly,” says Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University. Phillip Magness, a political and economic historian who wrote a book critiquing The 1619 Project, says there could be merit in using the project — and, importantly, the debate surrounding it — as a teaching device. “The best we can hope for at the present moment is that teachers in K-12 education will teach the debate around The 1619 Project,” he says. “They'll not only teach the material that appears in The New York Times Magazine, but they'll also look at some of the critiques that have been written and some of the debates that have occurred. I think that can be a constructive learning exercise.” However, some critics say using The 1619 Project to teach history raises serious questions. “You do not teach children generation upon generation that the nation they find themselves in is among the worst in history, that it was vile from the beginning, and expect that they want to be citizens,” says Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. Many who criticize the project say it presents U.S. history through a political lens, narrowed to show slavery at the center of U.S. history and little else. That narrow view, they say, is not the best way to convey history, whether in schools or to the public more broadly. “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery,” said James McPherson, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University and author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1988 book on the Civil War. “I was a little bit unhappy with the idea that people who did not have a good knowledge of the subject would be influenced by this and would then have a biased or narrow view.” The question of how to teach slavery in U.S. schools, and the lack of clear standards for doing so, is a matter of concern, Times reporter Nikita Stewart, now an assistant editor, wrote in an essay that is part of The 1619 Project. States are not required to set academic standards for teaching history and social studies, as they are for subjects such as math and English, she wrote. “That means that there is no consensus on the curriculum around slavery, no uniform recommendation to explain an institution that was debated in the crafting of the Constitution and that has influenced nearly every aspect of American society since,” Stewart wrote. The lack of consensus, she said, has real-world consequences because it means that many students are not taught the unvarnished realities of slavery. “Think about what it would mean for our education system to properly teach students — young children and teenagers — about enslavement,” Stewart wrote. “It's ugly. For generations, we've been unwilling to do it. “Elementary-school teachers, worried about disturbing children, tell students about the ‘good’ people, like the abolitionists and the Black people who escaped to freedom, but leave out the details of why they were protesting or what they were fleeing…. That means students graduate with a poor understanding of how slavery shaped our country, and they are unable to recognize the powerful and lasting effects it has had.” Some say that must change. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University, articulated the argument in a preface to the Southern Poverty Law Center report. “To achieve the noble aims of the nation's architects, we the people have to eliminate racial injustice in the present,” he wrote. “But we cannot do that until we come to terms with racial injustice in our past, beginning with slavery.” — Glen Justice
Bibliography
Books
Magness, Phillip , The 1619 Project: A Critique , American Institute for Economic Research, 2020. An economic and political historian dissects the historical and ideological points in The 1619 Project on slavery published by The New York Times Magazine.
Wilkerson, Isabel , Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent , Random House, 2020. A former New York Times writer documents the treatment of African Americans throughout U.S. history and the ways that race has harmed the American experiment.
Wood, Peter W. , 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project , Encounter Books, 2020. The president of the National Association of Scholars critiques The 1620 Project and argues that America's origin story should start with the signing of the Mayflower compact — the self-governing rules adopted by the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony — in 1620.
Articles
“We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/j2s1deel. The Times answers a letter from five historians who criticized The 1619 Project, including its portrayal of the American Revolution as a war to preserve slavery.
Bouie, Jamelle , “America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/5ykxk7wy. A Times opinion columnist examines the impact of slavery on democracy and representative government.
Desmond, Matthew , “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ythmn84t. A sociology professor at Princeton University argues that America's harsh version of capitalism stemmed from slavery, which “didn't just deny black freedom but built white fortunes.”
Elliott, Mary, and Jazmine Hughes , “Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don't know the full story of slavery,” The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/5h5cjhgb. A museum curator of slavery (Elliott) and a Times writer and editor (Hughes) compile a history of American slavery created in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole , “Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/2fabqaz2. The Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay in The 1619 Project describes racism in America, the contributions slaves made to the nation and the purpose of The Times' project.
Kurtz, Stanley , “A Book for Our Times: Peter Wood's 1620 Skewers 1619 Project,” National Review, Nov. 16, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/xdzfiizd. The conservative magazine reviews and praises a book that is critical of The 1619 Project.
Neason, Alexandria , “The 1619 Project and the stories we tell about slavery,” Columbia Journalism Review, Aug. 15, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/1vzq42oz. A journalist reviews The 1619 Project, praising it for looking “backwards to inform a path forward.”
Serwer, Adam , “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts,” The Atlantic, Dec. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/2tfq2byp. An Atlantic staff writer dissects the intense debate surrounding The 1619 Project.
Silverstein, Jake , “Why We Published The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 1619, https://tinyurl.com/1tmuz71f. The editor of The Times Magazine explains the origins and goals of The 1619 Project.
Stephens, Bret , “The 1619 Chronicles,” The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y62mkxey. A New York Times columnist argues that The 1619 Project “has failed,” one reason being that journalists should not be writing history.
Stewart, Nikita , “‘We are committing educational malpractice’: Why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in American schools,” The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/444bkudd. A Times reporter explores schools' ongoing struggles to teach the history of slavery.
Reports and Studies
Hannah-Jones, Nikole , et al., “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/326da8hn. The New York Times Magazine looks at the U.S. past and present through the lens of slavery, arguing that 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to North America, is the true origin point of the United States.
Shuster, Kate , et al., “Teaching Hard History,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Jan. 31, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/3at4r5xr. A survey of U.S. students shows that many are woefully undereducated on the history of slavery in the United States.
Go to top The Next Step Biden Administration “Governor Lamont Announces Connecticut Becomes First State in Nation To Require High Schools [To] Provide Courses on Black and Latino Studies,” Office of Governor Ned Lamont, Dec. 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/1idxngub. Miguel Cardona, Connecticut's education commissioner and President Biden's pick to be U.S. Education secretary, supported a new requirement that all Connecticut public schools offer courses on African American, Puerto Rican and Latino history. Rappeport, Alan , “Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Redesign to be Accelerated by Biden Administration,” The New York Times, Jan. 25, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/15qkd9gc. The Biden administration plans to issue redesigned $20 bills with the likeness of famed 19th-century abolitionist Harriet Tubman sooner than anticipated, after the process was delayed during Donald Trump's presidency. Wong, Kenneth K. , “The Biden presidency and a new direction in education policy,” Brookings, Dec. 17, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/1by78pbq. The new administration outlines an ambitious education agenda, including tackling systemic racism in the schools. Education Carter, Josh , “Bill would withhold state funds from any Mississippi school teaching The 1619 Project,” WLOX, Jan. 29, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4phny4ky. Legislation introduced in the Mississippi Senate would cut a school's state funding by 25 percent if it teaches The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine's controversial special issue that placed slavery at the center of U.S. history. DeMillo, Andrew , “GOP states weigh limits on how race and slavery are taught,” The Associated Press, Feb. 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3fhggm4v. Proposals in Arkansas, Iowa and Mississippi would prohibit schools from using The 1619 Project in the classroom because of what critics call its left-wing bias. Walkenhorst, Emily , “NC Board of Education vote expected on changes to social studies classes,” WRAL.com, Feb. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/1n9mjekh. The North Carolina Board of Education's new teaching standards will emphasize the perspective of a variety of groups, including traditionally marginalized people. Garden of Heroes Kuperinsky, Amy , “Trump names Whitney Houston, Grover Cleveland, Frank Sinatra to National Garden of American Heroes,” NJ.com, Jan. 19, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/1fcf4xne. Then-President Trump's final list of names for his proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would celebrate national greatness, included several recording artists alongside figures including former “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek and Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Recker, Jane , “Trump's National Garden of American Heroes Will Rival the National Mall in Size,” Washingtonian, Aug. 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/562yhzeq. Historians criticized the list of heroes as “odd,” and critics warned the task force working on the project was considering including toppled Confederate statues. Sommerfeldt, Chris , “Folk singer Woody Guthrie — who despised Trump's dad — to get a statue in his presidential sculpture garden of ‘heroes,’” New York Daily News, Jan. 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/10kmb1n8. Woody Guthrie, who is included in President Trump's list of heroes for the garden, wrote a song criticizing Trump's father for segregating the housing units he owned in 1950. 1776 Commission Murillo, Ana Lucia , “1776 Commission Page Scrubbed From White House Website Minutes After Biden Takes Office,” Daily Beast, Jan. 20, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ncw901ns. Shortly after being sworn in, President Biden removed from the White House website the 45-page report by the 1776 Commission, which Donald Trump had formed to counter The 1619 Project. Ruiz-Grossman, Sarah , “Trump Administration's ‘1776 Report’ Justifies Slavery, Three-Fifths Compromise,” HuffPost, Jan. 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/su5wat4u. The 1776 Commission suggested that “no durable union” could have been formed without the three-fifths compromise, which counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a human when apportioning House seats — and which increased the South's representation in Congress. Sheinerman, Marie-Rose , “Princeton historians condemn Trump administration's 1776 commission report,” The Daily Princetonian, Jan. 24, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2hlngjkd. Several history professors — including some who say The 1619 Project contains inaccuracies — criticized the commission report as a political document “that isn't really about understanding founding principles and history.” Go to top Contacts American Historical Association
400 A St., S.E., Washington, DC 20003
202-544-2422
historians.org
Association of historians that promotes professional standards in teaching and scholarship. NAACP
4805 Mount Hope Drive, Baltimore, MD 21215
410-580-5777
naacp.org
Century-old civil rights organization working to eliminate race-based discrimination. National Association of Scholars
420 Madison Ave., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10017
917-551-6770
nas.org
Nonprofit that supports intellectual freedom and is working to reform higher education. National Museum of African American History and Culture
1400 Constitution Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20560
844-750-3012
nmaahc.si.edu
The Smithsonian Institution's museum dedicated to documenting African American life, history and culture. The New York Times
620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018
800-698-4637
nytimes.com
News organization founded in 1851 that put together The 1619 Project on slavery in the United States. Organization of American Historians
112 N. Bryan Ave., Bloomington, IN 47408-4141
812-855-7311
oah.org
Professional society founded in 1907 dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. Pew Research Center
1615 L St., N.W., Suite 800, Washington, DC 20036
202-419-4300
pewresearch.org
Nonpartisan research organization that studies racial issues, public attitudes and trends worldwide. The Pulitzer Center
1779 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Suite #615, Washington, DC 20036
202-332-0982
pulitzercenter.org
Organization that supplies funding for enterprising journalism and creates educational programming. Urban League
80 Pine St., 9th Floor, New York, NY 10005
212-558-5300
nul.org
A 110-year-old civil rights and urban advocacy organization. Go to top
Footnotes
Go to top
About the Author
Glen Justice has covered advocacy and political influence for two decades, working on staff at The New York Times and other publications. He currently runs Outside Voice, the custom content company that he founded, and writes for numerous publications.
Go to top
Document APA Citation
Justice, G. (2021, February 12). Slavery's legacy. CQ researcher, 31, 1-18. http://library.cqpress.com/
Document ID: cqresrre2021021200
Document URL: http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2021021200
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Feb. 12, 2021 |
Slavery's Legacy |
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May 12, 2017 |
Anti-Semitism |
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Mar. 17, 2017 |
‘Alt-Right’ Movement |
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Sep. 18, 2015 |
Far-Right Extremism |
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Nov. 22, 2013 |
Racial Profiling |
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May 08, 2009 |
Hate Groups |
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Jun. 01, 2007 |
Shock Jocks  |
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Jan. 07, 1994 |
Racial Tensions in Schools |
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Jan. 08, 1993 |
Hate Crimes |
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May 12, 1989 |
The Growing Danger of Hate Groups |
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Nov. 05, 1969 |
American History: Reappraisal and Revision |
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Mar. 31, 1965 |
Extremist Movements in Race and Politics |
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May 13, 1964 |
Racism in America |
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Dec. 03, 1958 |
Spread of Terrorism and Hatemongering |
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Jul. 10, 1946 |
Ku Klux Klan |
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Jan. 09, 1945 |
Race Equality |
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Dec. 19, 1933 |
Lynching and Kidnapping |
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