This dilemma was addressed in 2019 \u2014 400\u00a0years after 20 slaves landed in America.\u00a0We know enslaved Africans were already in the Americas, but after The New York Times published its \u201c1619 Project,\u201d\u00a0an illuminating series of documented essays on the centrality of slavery in our national history, we snapped out of our collective inertia. The project spurned a flurry of activity and energy to work to somehow right this perverse wrong.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was so well received that the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting\u00a0provided, online, free lesson plans for teachers. More than 4,500 teachers across the country are using the materials.<\/p>\n
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Historical marker on the arrival of the first "20 and odd" Africans to America in Hampton, Virginia. (Photo: Jarrad Henderson\/USA TODAY)<\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately, nipping at the heels of the award-winning 1619 Project was the \u201c1776 Commission\u201d established by former President Donald Trump, designed to counter the project\u2019s premise that slavery is central to our national story with a specious counterhistory of its own. The American Historical Association dismissed the commission\u2019s report as \u201cwritten hastily in one month \u2026 without any consultation with professional historians.\u201d Moreover, the AHS noted, Trump\u2019s commission even \u201cignores the Confederate States of America.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n America’s slave trade:<\/strong>\u00a0‘Weeping Time’ memorial shines a light on Savannah’s darkest days<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing going on in today\u2019s cancel culture as insidiously revisionist as ignoring the Confederacy\u2019s rebellion against the results of the election of 1860.<\/p>\n Today, on the heels of the culture-canceling Trump commission report, come Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri and South Dakota who want to stop \u2014 cancel, if you will \u2014 the 1619 Project from being taught in public schools. Their bills use some of the same language as a federal bill introduced by Arkansas Sen.\u00a0Tom Cotton, “The Saving American History Act of 2021.” At least three of the measures\u00a0have died.<\/p>\n The struggle to reopen George Floyd Square: <\/strong>‘Injustice closed these streets; only justice should open them’<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Bear in mind that the 1619 Project is historiography, the study of how history is written about. The project presents a perspective, missing until now, that places the role played by African Americans in the founding of the country as essential to our national being. It does not diminish the role or history of white Europeans, but it does contrast the internal contradiction (some would say hypocrisy) of promulgating \u201cequality for all\u201d while building a system based on forced labor.\u00a0<\/p>\n The bills\u2019 sponsors say the 1619 Project is divisive. The subject of slavery versus \u201cthe equality of all men\u201d is, in fact, inherently divisive. When we get down to the nub of it, this is what the past four years have been about. Tragically, the radical right\u2019s\u00a0populist movement will never accept the fact that American history was never about the history of all Americans.\u00a0<\/p>\n It has become painfully clear that today\u2019s Republican Party has slowly and systematically attempted to exclude one group of citizens after another, widening the exclusionary circle to encompass the entire Democratic Party and, most recently, even Vice President Mike Pence and other insufficiently zealous members of their own party. Indeed, nine out of the 10\u00a0House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump already have primary challengers.<\/p>\n Rioters supporting President Donald Trump storm the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo: John Minchillo, AP)<\/span><\/p>\n What we have witnessed since 2016, to borrow a phrase from Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Secretary of State William Seward, is the \u201clast shriek, on the retreat” of racism.\u00a0Like the Confederate insurrectionists of 1860, their \u201ccompromise\u201d is really an absolutism, an exclusion from equality that must be obeyed.\u00a0<\/p>\n We saw the end result of Republican absolutism in the insurrection of Jan. 6 when a murderous mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to hang the vice president, murder the speaker of the House\u00a0and kill any elected officials who disagreed with their leader\u2019s lie about a stolen election.<\/p>\n We are witnessing the same warfare again with state Republican parties waging war against voting rights. It\u2019s part of a plan to roll back the progress of moving toward\u00a0a more perfect union \u2014 the fight to make the promise of true equality real for everyone in America.\u00a0<\/p>\n Our children deserve to learn this universal truth and American value: Equality is either for everyone or it will be for no one.<\/p>\nDesperate to stop\u00a0equality for all<\/h2>\n
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