Author: Neal Saye

A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.

“We are often taught in schools that Lincoln freed the slaves, but we are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children, or money to buy any of it.”

“Narratives collected from formerly enslaved people for the 1930s Federal Writers Project reveal the horrors of mass starvation, of ‘liberated’ Black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields, before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die.”

“‘With the advent of emancipation,’ writes the historian Keri Leigh Merritt, ‘Blacks became the only race in the US ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital.’” p. 464 (with documentation).