The 1619 Project
The 1619 Project is an ongoing project developed by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 with the goal of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States and timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony. It is an interactive project directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times, with contributions by the newspaper's writers, including essays on the history of different aspects of contemporary American life which the authors believe have "roots in slavery and its aftermath." It also includes poems, short fiction, and a photo essay. Originally conceived as a special issue for August 20, 2019, it was soon turned into a full-fledged project, including a special broadsheet section in the newspaper, live events, and a multi-episode podcast series.
The project has sparked criticism and debate among historians and political commentators. In a letter published in The New York Times in December 2019, historians Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes expressed "strong reservations" about the project and requested factual corrections, accusing the project of putting ideology before historical understanding. In response, Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, defended the accuracy of the 1619 Project and declined to issue corrections. In March 2020, historian Leslie M. Harris, who served as a fact-checker for the 1619 Project, wrote that the authors had ignored her corrections, but that the project was a needed corrective to prevailing historical narratives.
Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the 1619 Project.
Background
The project addresses "the beginning of American slavery", which it places in 1619; it was launched in August 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies and its legacy. The first enslaved Africans in the English colonies of mainland North America arrived in August 1619. A ship carrying 20–30 people who had been enslaved by a joint African-Portuguese war on Ndongo in modern Angola, landed at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia.Project
The project was based on a proposal by Hannah-Jones to dedicate an issue of the magazine to a re-examination of the legacy of slavery in America, at the anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves to Virginia. The plan was to challenge the notion that the history of the United States began in 1776. The initiative quickly grew into a larger project. The project encompasses multiple issues of the magazine, with related materials in multiple other publications of the Times as well as a project curriculum developed in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, for use in schools. The project employed a panel of historians and had support from the Smithsonian, for fact-checking, research and development. The project was envisioned with the condition that almost all of the contributions would be from African-American contributors, deeming the perspective of black writers an essential element of the story to be told.August 14 magazine issue
The first edition, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on August 14, 2019, published in 100 pages with ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of poems and fiction by an additional 16 writers, included the following works:The essays discuss details of modern American society, such as traffic jams and the American affinity for sugar, and their connections to slavery and segregation. Matthew Desmond's essay shows the way in which slavery has shaped modern capitalism and workplace norms. Jamelle Bouie's essay draws parallels between pro-slavery politics and the modern right-wing politics. Bouie argues that America still has not let go of the assumption that some people inherently deserve more power than others.
Accompanying material and activities
The magazine issue was accompanied by a special section in the Sunday newspaper, in partnership with the Smithsonian, examining the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, written by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes. Beginning on August 20, a multi-episode audio series titled "1619" was started, published by The Daily, the morning news podcast of the Times. The Sunday sports section had an essay about slavery's impact on professional sports in America: "Is Slavery's Legacy in the Power Dynamics of Sports?". The Times plans to take the project to schools, with the 1619 Project Curriculum developed in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine issue were printed for distribution to schools, museums and libraries.The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting has made available free online lesson plans, is collecting further lesson plans from teachers, and helps arrange for speakers to visit classes. The Center considers most of the lessons usable by all grades from elementary school through college.
Reception
According to Vox, as of August 19, 2019, the project, harshly criticized by some conservatives, had "largely earned praise from academics, journalists and politicians alike". The positive reviews include the analysis by Alexandria Neason for the Columbia Journalism Review, and the review by Ellen McGirt, published in Fortune magazine which declared the project "wide-reaching and collaborative, unflinching, and insightful" and a "dramatic and necessary corrective to the fundamental lie of the American origin story". Andrew Sullivan critiqued the project as an important perspective that needed to be heard, but one presented in a biased way under the guise of objectivity. Other commentators who both lauded and criticised the project include Damon Linkler who called it a "remarkable achievement", but found its treatment of history "sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious", Timothy Sandefur who deemed the project's goal worthy, but observed that the articles persistently went wrong trying to connect everything with slavery, Phillip W. Magness who wrote that the Project provided a distorted economic history borrowed from "bad scholarship" of the New History of Capitalism, and Rich Lowry who wrote there was much truth and much to learn from in Hannah-Jones' lead essay but it left out unwelcome facts about slavery, smeared the revolution, distorted the constitution and misrepresented the founding era and Lincoln. The World Socialist Web Site criticized what its editors consider the Times reactionary, politically motivated "falsification of history" that wrongly centers around racial rather than class conflict, and published a series of interviews with prominent historians critical of the project, including Victoria E. Bynum, James M. McPherson, Gordon S. Wood, James Oakes, Richard Carwardine and Clayborne Carson.In December 2019, five leading American historians, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, sent a letter to the Times expressing objections to the framing of the project and accusing the authors of a "displacement of historical understanding by ideology". The letter disputed the claim, made in the Hannah-Jones' introductory essay to the 1619 Project, 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 Times published the letter along with a rebuttal from the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein. Wood responded in a letter, "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776." In an article in The Atlantic, Wilentz responded to Silverstein, writing, "No effort to educate the public in order to advance social justice can afford to dispense with a respect for basic facts", and disputing the factual accuracy of Silverstein's defense of the project. In March 2020, historian Leslie M. Harris who was consulted for the Project, wrote in Politico that she had warned that the idea that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery was inaccurate, and that the Times made avoidable mistakes, but that the project was "a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories". Hannah-Jones has also said that she stands by the claim that slavery helped fuel the revolution, though she concedes she might have phrased it too strongly in her essay, in a way that could give readers the impression that the support for slavery was universal. On March 11, 2020, Silverstein authored an "update" in the form of a "clarification" on Times website, correcting Hannah-Jones's essay to state that "protecting slavery was a primary motivation for some of the colonists".
Political reaction
The publication of the project received varied reactions from political figures. Democratic Senator Kamala Harris praised the project, in a tweet, stating "The #1619Project is a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history. We cannot understand and address the problems of today without speaking truth about how we got here." Several high profile conservatives criticized the project. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized the project as "brainwashing" "propaganda", in a tweet, and later wrote an op-ed characterising it as "left-wing propaganda masquerading as 'the truth'". Republican Senator Ted Cruz also equated it with propaganda. President Donald Trump, in an interview on Fox News, said, "I just look at -- I look at school. I watch, I read, look at the stuff. Now they want to change -- 1492, Columbus discovered America. You know, we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that's what we learned. Now they want to make it the 1619 project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I don't even know".In February 2020, a rival project called the 1776 Project was launched under the aegis of The Washington Examiner.