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).
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
A major contributor to the prosperity of the United States …
“The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans, just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s indigenous people.
Though our high school history books seldom make this plain, slavery and the hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known ad Jim Crow were, above all else, systems of economic exploitation. To borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father.” p. 458
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
“Donald Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud in the wake of the 2020 presidential election were an expression of the idea that only certain majorities are real majorities, that only some Americans deserve to hold power.”
“And while Trump lost and left office, the idea persists.”
“Rather than mobilize new voters or persuade existing ones, Republicans throughout the country have set about restricting access to the forms of voting that helped Democrats win in traditionally Republican states like Georgia and Arizona.”
“In Michigan, likewise, Republican lawmakers want to change the way the state distributes its Electoral College votes to nullify the influence of Detroit [overwhelmingly Black] on the final result.” p. 208
May our democracy survive this extremist far-right onslaught of truth, integrity and American values.
A blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were jtraded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
Difficult U.S. Presidential truth …
“[T]en of this nation’s first twelve Presidents were enslavers.“ p. 19
And look at this “poster” I found while Googling “Presidents who owned slaves” …
We don’t see these truths in Presidents Day coloring books.
And why is truth “indoctrinating” and “brainwashing” our children?
Are we so weak as a people that we cannot hear and bear truth?
A blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
Antebellum Plantations. Such Southern beauty!
But we need Truth in Terminology, Truth in Naming …
A blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
A few thoughts on the Revolutionary War period in U.S. history.
“The wealthy, educated men who led the revolt against Britain needed to unify the disparate colonists across social class and region. For those leaders, the comparison to slavery constituted a powerful rhetorical tool.” The 1619 Project
George Washington, Brittanica.com
George Washington’s words:
“‘The Crisis has arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heap’d upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame & abject slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway,” Washington warned in an August 1774 letter to his friend and neighbor Bryan Fairfax.
It is important, even imperative, that we stop Disney-fying our “Founding Fathers” and see their darker sides as well, especially those sides which involve enslaving people. Surely we can all agree that darker sides abound in us all.
A blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
Thomas Jefferson and Truth
Mount RushmoreThomas Jefferson
“In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these famous words. ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”
“For the last two and a half centuries, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty.”
“As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of these rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call.“
“His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half-Black brother of Jefferson‘s wife Martha, born to her father and a woman he enslaved. It was common and profitable for white enslavers to keep their half-Black children in slavery.”
“Jefferson, who would later hold in slavery his own children by Heming’s sister Sally, had chosen Robert Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people who worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new republican union based on the individual rights of men.” The 1619 Project
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WHY do so many have such white fragility toward admitting this documented and obvious truth—that slavery built our nation early on? Why can’t we simply come clean and admit it? Allow truth a chance to heal us.
A blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.” James Baldwin
Why do we (white Americans) have such a difficult time acknowledging the difficult truth that our nation was founded on the backs of the enslaved?
From The 1619 Project‘s first chapter:
“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. A right to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness did not include fully one-fifth of the new country.’” p.11
Truth can hurt. But Truth can also lead to change.
A new blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
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As you may recall (if you follow my blog), HR and I have matching chairs in our study, which often find us reading away.
Robert and I are currently slowly reading through The 1619 Project. Do you know about it? What a brilliant and fascinating work, a collection of essays, imaginative literature, photographs and artwork produced by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
Why should we read and consider this work? Here are a few introductory excerpts …
As the Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo writes in Slavery in the Age of Memory, “despite its ambitions of objectivity,,” public history is molded by the perspectives of the most powerful members of society.
And in the United States, public history has often been “racialized, gendered and interwoven in the fabric of white supremacy.” Yet it is still posed as objective.
“History is the fruit of power,” writes Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, and “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”
In exposing our nation’s troubled roots, The 1619 Project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the unquestioned truth. It asks us to consider who sets and shapes our shared national memory and what and who gets left out. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David W. Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil Warbin American Memory, our nation’s “glorious remembrance is all but overwhelmed by an even more glorious forgetting.”
White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.
As we approach July 4th celebrations, may we pause to consider the full and difficult history behind and far before the firework-y holiday.
NealEnJoy 