The crafting of the 1619 Project by the New York Times has created a new space for dialogue and debate about the centrality of slavery to the American experiment. “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true,” wrote Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who originally conceived of the idea for the 1619 Project. The project is but a latest example of how African American history, when given a prominent place in the public, sells. It is an intriguing phenomenon that has echoes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Civil Rights and Black Power movements pushed Americans to think harder about the African American experience. Likewise, the rise of Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter has created space in the public sphere for more discussion of African American history.
Such hunger for African American history has been driven, partially, by the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. While the debate over reparations for the legacy of slavery to African Americans long pre-dates Coates’ 2014 essay, his “The Case for Reparations” has played a role in reigniting the debate in a very public way. The hope with such works is that they not only capture public interest, but then readers of a Coates essay then turn to read longer, academic works—such as Ana Lucia Araujo’s Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. Or, for that matter, Caleb McDaniel’s Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America. Both books deal in different ways with the question of reparations for the enslavement of Africans in America.
The 1619 Project comes just as questions about the importance of slavery to the rise of capitalism and American society continue to rage across the discipline of history. Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, for instance, had an influence on some of the essays in the 1619 Project that dealt with how slavery crafted the mechanisms of modern economics—such as Matthew Desmond’s essay on the relationship between slavery and American capitalism. I think most historians enjoy seeing such work on such a visible platform as the New York Times. They also hope, however, that the public understands the longer legacy of debate, research, and writing that informs such arguments. The 1619 Project makes little sense unless we also realize how much it owes to scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, and so many others.
Recently, The Atlantic published a piece on the plight of African American farmers, and how much they’ve been hurt historically by federal programs that racially discriminated against them. Vann Newkirk’s piece is, again, a reminder of how much African American history lives with us in ways that most Americans don’t recognize—or, in many cases, simply refuse to acknowledge. In popular culture, the upcoming release of Harriet, about the lifelong warrior against slavery Harriet Tubman, will ensure that discussion of slavery and racism continue to play a part in American debates about history and culture.
We should welcome debate and discussion about works such as the 1619 Project. The National Review and other publications have responded to the project with their own critiques and analyses. The community of historians who’ve enjoyed the 1619 Project should also not shy away from critiquing it when necessary, because there is plenty of space for additional projects like this to run in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. It is a good time to care about history—let’s make sure to utilize that to further the profession of history.
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