In the Fall of 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 project, this kind of sprawling special issue
commemorating the 400th anniversary of the year African slaves were first brought to
American shores. 1619 was the brainchild of star journalist and MacArthur "Genius" Nikole
Hannah-Jones. It claimed to be this daring deconstruction of America.
This anniversary is the reason we even exist as a country.
We would not be the United States, were it not for slavery.
You can look across all these aspects of modern day society and see the legacy of slavery;
sugar, geography, capitalism, why there's so much traffic in Atlanta. All of this kind
of goes back to that original sin. 1619 was a sensation, driving record subscription
numbers. It even got its own Superbowl commercial. America was not yet America, but this was
the moment it began. This new history rests on a radical revision
of America’s birth year. In the opening essay, Hannah-Jones claimed that the Founding
Fathers had actually declared independence to protect slavery.
We were founded not as a democracy, but as a slaveocracy.
Oh yeah, your sixth grade history teacher was a propagandist. Washington and Jefferson
broke off from British in order to protect the practice of brutal human bondage. So what's
the evidence for this radical revision? The project was based on recent scholarship
which has dramatically deepened our understanding of this country's origins and our founding.
Thank you so much for inviting me to facilitate this important conversation and get a group
of historians who really know their stuff. Gerald Horne is the Moores Professor of History
at the University of Houston. This is a book that seeks to puncture the
creation myth about the United States of America. It was certainly a great leap forward for
white supremacy. So this is our sturdy scholarly source, huh?
Professor Horne has some other opinions that might make one ever so slightly skeptical
of his credibility. So you know Robert Mugabe, the brutal African dictator who routinely
dispatched his North Korean-trained goon squads to liquidate his political opponents? Horne
kinda has a soft spot for the guy.
Or Fidel Castro, the Cuban autocrat who oversaw
the mass imprisonment of undesirable political elements like, you know, journalists and homosexuals?
Or the Soviet Union, the one that weaponized
famine to murder millions of Ukrainians? Horne has said that even its victims would consider
the fall of the Soviet Union “a geopolitical catastrophe.”
So the great New York Times, with all of its prestige and reach, is laundering the crank
ravings of a fringe academic with a fetish for authoritarian terror.
Y'all didn’t know it was going to get this real huh?
Human bondage has been a feature of virtually every civilization, of every possible color
combination. Those 20 people delivered to the New World in 1619 were not, in fact, slaves.
They, like the vast majority of white people coming here, were indentured servants. The
bulk of African slaves and servants were funneled through a lucrative partnership between African
elites and European merchants. These unlucky 20 were full human beings, just as conscious
and alive as you or me. And their stories, and their suffering, deserves to be told.
The Founders were the first to build a country rejecting the ancient human hierarchies that
most people in most places had simply taken for granted. The first anti-slavery meeting
in the history of human civilization takes place in Philadelphia. Key framers denounced
slavery as an “abhorrence”, as “barbarism.” This was in defiance of Britain,
which didn’t fully abolish slavery until nearly 60 years after the revolution. “All
men are created equal.” We’ve become acclimated to the majesty of that phrase. But back then
it represented a radical reimagining of human relations, and the document it inspired empowered
the freedom struggles to come. Most of the conservatives who have come out
against the project it's clear they haven't read a single word of it. They're not calling
out the facts of it, they can't argue the facts. They just don't like what it's saying.
That defense has not aged well. The 1619 project has been pummeled by professional historians
on the Right and the Left. Including Gordon Wood, the Grand Jedi Master of American Revolution
scholars. You're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon
Wood. It has the authority of the New York Times
behind it, and yet it could be so wrong in so many ways.
The Times eventually offered up a fake correction, that just some of founders wanted to protect
slavery. And now it’s pumping this fake history into
schools, turning the 1619 project into an educational curriculum.
The curriculum is actually being taught in every state in the country, in more than 80
cities. Educators are willing to tear up how they had planned their curriculum to teach
this. If there was any justice in this world, Bob
Woodson would be at least as famous as Al Sharpton. He's spent four decades pioneering
a practical black activism that actually improves people's lives. He founded 1776 specifically
to counter the hip fatalism of the 1619 Project. What 1619 postures is that all of
the problems facing inner city blacks are attributed to factors that are external to
that community. Explain to me how institutional racism could cause black people to fail in
systems run by their own people, tell me how that works! Nothing is more lethal to a people
than to convey to them that it's impossible for them to be agents of their own uplift.
Black America has exhibited, many of them, a level of resilience; in the Bronzeville
section of Chicago, at a time of redlining, in 1929 there was 731 black owned businesses.
Blacks controlled 100 million dollars is real estate assets. When blacks were denied access
to hotels we built our own; the Waluhaje in Atalanta, the Saint Charles in Chicago. Kids
in the inner city are inspired to improve their lives when you give them victories that
are possible. There are two groups of people that I am sick and tired of, that is self-flagellating
guilty white people and angry rich blacks.