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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/letter-to-the-editor-historians-critique-the-1619-project-and-we-respond.htm
Letter to the Editor: Historians Critique The 1619 Project, and We Respond
Five historians wrote to us with their reservations. Our editor in chief
replies.
Published Dec. 20, 2019
Updated Dec. 21, 2019
The letter below will be published in the Dec. 29 issue of The New York
Times Magazine.
RE: The 1619 Project
We write as historians to express our strong reservations about
important aspects of The 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer
a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy
become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious
plans to make the project available to schools in the form of
curriculums and related instructional material.
We applaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and
racism to our history. Some of us have devoted our entire professional
lives to those efforts, and all of us have worked hard to advance them.
Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s
past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent
public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual
errors in the project and the closed process behind it.
These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as
interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which
are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism.
They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.
Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections
of only “white historians” — has affirmed that displacement.
On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the
project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of
Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true.
If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement
offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other
material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the
most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”
Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham
Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the
Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as
well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white
supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s
agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in
Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Instead, the project
asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an
argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by
champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.
The 1619 Project has not been presented as the views of individual
writers — views that in some cases, as on the supposed direct
connections between slavery and modern corporate practices, have so far
failed to establish any empirical veracity or reliability and have been
seriously challenged by other historians. Instead, the project is
offered as an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and
credibility of The New York Times. Those connected with the project have
assured the public that its materials were shaped by a panel of
historians and have been scrupulously fact-checked. Yet the process
remains opaque. The names of only some of the historians involved have
been released, and the extent of their involvement as “consultants” and
fact checkers remains vague. The selective transparency deepens our concern.
We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy
and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions
presented in The 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these
mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in
all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New
York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process
through which the historical materials were and continue to be
assembled, checked and authenticated.
Sincerely,
Victoria Bynum, distinguished emerita professor of history, Texas State
University;
James M. McPherson, George Henry Davis 1886 emeritus professor of
American history, Princeton University;
James Oakes, distinguished professor, the Graduate Center, the City
University of New York;
Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American history,
Princeton University;
Gordon S. Wood, Alva O. Wade University emeritus professor and emeritus
professor of history, Brown University.
----
NY Times response:
Since The 1619 Project was published in August, we have received a great
deal of feedback from readers, many of them educators, academics and
historians. A majority have reacted positively to the project, but there
have also been criticisms. Some I would describe as constructive, noting
episodes we might have overlooked; others have treated the work more
harshly. We are happy to accept all of this input, as it helps us
continue to think deeply about the subject of slavery and its legacy.
The letter from Professors Bynum, McPherson, Oakes, Wilentz and Wood
differs from the previous critiques we have received in that it contains
the first major request for correction. We are familiar with the
objections of the letter writers, as four of them have been interviewed
in recent months by the World Socialist Web Site. We’re glad for a
chance to respond directly to some of their objections.
Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are
motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in
their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with
their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is
driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we
welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to
The 1619 Project is warranted.
The project was intended to address the marginalization of
African-American history in the telling of our national story and
examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. We are not
ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at
current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way
it is? In the case of the persistent racism and inequality that plague
this country, the answer to that question led us inexorably into the
past — and not just for this project. The project’s creator, Nikole
Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at the magazine, has consistently used
history to inform her journalism, primarily in her work on educational
segregation (work for which she has been recognized with numerous
honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship).
Though we may not be historians, we take seriously the responsibility of
accurately presenting history to readers of The New York Times. The
letter writers express concern about a “closed process” and an opaque
“panel of historians,” so I’d like to make clear the steps we took. We
did not assemble a formal panel for this project. Instead, during the
early stages of development, we consulted with numerous scholars of
African-American history and related fields, in a group meeting at The
Times as well as in a series of individual conversations. (Five of those
who initially consulted with us — Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of
California, Irvine; Matthew Desmond and Kevin M. Kruse, both of
Princeton University; and Tiya Miles and Khalil G. Muhammad, both of
Harvard University — went on to publish articles in the issue.) After
those consultations, writers conducted their own research, reading
widely, examining primary documents and artifacts and interviewing
historians. Finally, during the fact-checking process, our researchers
carefully reviewed all the articles in the issue with subject-area
experts. This is no different from what we do on any article.
As the five letter writers well know, there are often debates, even
among subject-area experts, about how to see the past. Historical
understanding is not fixed; it is constantly being adjusted by new
scholarship and new voices. Within the world of academic history,
differing views exist, if not over what precisely happened, then about
why it happened, who made it happen, how to interpret the motivations of
historical actors and what it all means.
The passages cited in the letter, regarding the causes of the American
Revolution and the attitudes toward black equality of Abraham Lincoln,
are good examples of this. Both are found in the lead essay by
Hannah-Jones. We can hardly claim to have studied the Revolutionary
period as long as some of the signatories, nor do we presume to tell
them anything they don’t already know, but I think it would be useful
for readers to hear why we believe that Hannah-Jones’s claim 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” is grounded in the historical record.
The work of various historians, among them David Waldstreicher and
Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen, supports the contention that uneasiness
among slaveholders in the colonies about growing antislavery sentiment
in Britain and increasing imperial regulation helped motivate the
Revolution. One main episode that these and other historians refer to is
the landmark 1772 decision of the British high court in Somerset v.
Stewart. The case concerned a British customs agent named Charles
Stewart who bought an enslaved man named Somerset and took him to
England, where he briefly escaped. Stewart captured Somerset and planned
to sell him and ship him to Jamaica, only for the chief justice, Lord
Mansfield, to declare this unlawful, because chattel slavery was not
supported by English common law.
It is true, as Professor Wilentz has noted elsewhere, that the Somerset
decision did not legally threaten slavery in the colonies, but the
ruling caused a sensation nonetheless. Numerous colonial newspapers
covered it and warned of the tyranny it represented. Multiple historians
have pointed out that in part because of the Somerset case, slavery
joined other issues in helping to gradually drive apart the patriots and
their colonial governments. The British often tried to undermine the
patriots by mocking their hypocrisy in fighting for liberty while
keeping Africans in bondage, and colonial officials repeatedly
encouraged enslaved people to seek freedom by fleeing to British lines.
For their part, large numbers of the enslaved came to see the struggle
as one between freedom and continued subjugation. As Waldstreicher
writes, “The black-British alliance decisively pushed planters in these
[Southern] states toward independence.”
The culmination of this was the Dunmore Proclamation, issued in late
1775 by the colonial governor of Virginia, which offered freedom to any
enslaved person who fled his plantation and joined the British Army. A
member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress wrote
that this act did more to sever the ties between Britain and its
colonies “than any other expedient which could possibly have been
thought of.” The historian Jill Lepore writes in her recent book, “These
Truths: A History of the United States,” “Not the taxes and the tea, not
the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it
was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the
scales in favor of American independence.” And yet how many contemporary
Americans have ever even heard of it? Enslaved people at the time
certainly knew about it. During the Revolution, thousands sought freedom
by taking refuge with British forces.
As for the question of Lincoln’s attitudes on black equality, the letter
writers imply that Hannah-Jones was unfairly harsh toward our 16th
president. Admittedly, in an essay that covered several centuries and
ranged from the personal to the historical, she did not set out to
explore in full his continually shifting ideas about abolition and the
rights of black Americans. But she provides an important historical
lesson by simply reminding the public, which tends to view Lincoln as a
saint, that for much of his career, he believed that a necessary
prerequisite for freedom would be a plan to encourage the four million
formerly enslaved people to leave the country. To be sure, at the end of
his life, Lincoln’s racial outlook had evolved considerably in the
direction of real equality. Yet the story of abolition becomes more
complicated, and more instructive, when readers understand that even the
Great Emancipator was ambivalent about full black citizenship.
The letter writers also protest that Hannah-Jones, and the project’s
authors more broadly, ignore Lincoln’s admiration, which he shared with
Frederick Douglass, for the commitment to liberty espoused in the
Constitution. This seems to me a more general point of dispute. The
writers believe that the Revolution and the Constitution provided the
framework for the eventual abolition of slavery and for the equality of
black Americans, and that our project insufficiently credits both the
founders and 19th-century Republican leaders like Lincoln, Thaddeus
Stevens, Charles Sumner and others for their contributions toward
achieving these goals.
It may be true that under a less egalitarian system of government,
slavery would have continued for longer, but the United States was still
one of the last nations in the Americas to abolish the institution —
only Cuba and Brazil did so after us. And while our democratic system
has certainly led to many progressive advances for the rights of
minority groups over the past two centuries, these advances, as
Hannah-Jones argues in her essay, have almost always come as a result of
political and social struggles in which African-Americans have generally
taken the lead, not as a working-out of the immanent logic of the
Constitution.
And yet for all that, it is difficult to argue that equality has ever
been truly achieved for black Americans — not in 1776, not in 1865, not
in 1964, not in 2008 and not today. The very premise of The 1619
Project, in fact, is that many of the inequalities that continue to
afflict the nation are a direct result of the unhealed wound created by
250 years of slavery and an additional century of second-class
citizenship and white-supremacist terrorism inflicted on black people
(together, those two periods account for 88 percent of our history since
1619). These inequalities were the starting point of our project — the
facts that, to take just a few examples, black men are nearly six times
as likely to wind up in prison as white men, or that black women are
three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women, or that the
median family wealth for white people is $171,000, compared with just
$17,600 for black people. The rampant discrimination that black people
continue to face across nearly every aspect of American life suggests
that neither the framework of the Constitution nor the strenuous efforts
of political leaders in the past and the present, both white and black,
has yet been able to achieve the democratic ideals of the founding for
all Americans.
This is an important discussion to have, and we are eager to see it
continue. To that end, we are planning to host public conversations next
year among academics with differing perspectives on American history.
Good-faith critiques of our project only help us refine and improve it —
an important goal for us now that we are in the process of expanding it
into a book. For example, we have heard from several scholars who
profess to admire the project a great deal but wish it had included some
mention of African slavery in Spanish Florida during the century before
1619. Though we stand by the logic of marking the beginning of American
slavery with the year it was introduced in the English colonies, this
feedback has helped us think about the importance of considering the
prehistory of the period our project addresses.
Valuable critiques may come from many sources. The letter misperceives
our attitudes when it charges that we dismiss objections on racial
grounds. This appears to be a reference not to anything published in The
1619 Project itself, but rather to a November Twitter post from
Hannah-Jones in which she questioned whether “white historians” have
always produced objective accounts of American history. As is so often
the case on Twitter, context is important. In this instance,
Hannah-Jones was responding to a post, since deleted, from another user
claiming that many “white historians” objected to the project but were
hesitant to speak up. In her reply, she was trying to make the point
that for the most part, the history of this country has been told by
white historians (some of whom, as in the case of the Dunning School,
which grossly miseducated Americans about the history of Reconstruction
for much of the 20th century, produced accounts that were deeply
flawed), and that to truly understand the fullness and complexity of our
nation’s story, we need a greater variety of voices doing the telling.
That, above all, is what we hoped our project would do: expand the
reader’s sense of the American past. (This is how some educators are
using it to supplement their teaching of United States history.) That is
what the letter writers have done, in different ways, over the course of
their distinguished careers and in their many books. Though we may
disagree on some important matters, we are grateful for their input and
their interest in discussing these fundamental questions about the
country’s history.
Sincerely,
Jake Silverstein
Editor in chief
(There are important links in the passage below. Go to
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/letter-to-the-editor-historians-critique-the-1619-project-and-we-respond.html
in order to see them.)
The 1619 Project was launched in August 2019, on the 400th anniversary
of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies
that would become the United States. It consisted of two components: a
special issue of the magazine, containing 10 essays exploring the links
between contemporary American life and the legacy of slavery, as well as
a series of original poetry and fiction about key moments in the last
400 years; and a special broadsheet section, produced in collaboration
with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and
Culture. This work was converted into supplementary educational
materials in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. The materials are
available free on the Pulitzer Center’s website, pulitzercenter.org.
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