It is, in fact, a rejection of the history of black American freedom, not an embrace of it.
It is, in fact, a rejection of the history of black American freedom, not an embrace of it.
T he 1619 Project is back in the news again. The journalistic endeavor created by New York Times columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones in the summer of 2019 has caused controversy in academic circles ever since its inception. But that hasn’t stopped the deluge of accolades being heaped upon Hannah-Jones and her collaborators. Book deals, journalistic and literary prizes, and adulation from elites have made the 1619 Project a cash cow for its creators. So it’s unsurprising that Hulu has just released a docudrama based on Hannah-Jones’s work.
Jesse Holland of MSNBC called it a “masterly curation of interviews, videos, photos, and music that expands on her contention that our nation’s true founding occurred in 1619 when enslaved Africans landed in colonial America.” The episodes are thematic and undeniably well produced. Anecdotes and historical factoids are joined with first-rate cinematography to explain (or infer) slavery and 1619’s connection to different aspects of American life. “Democracy,” “Race,” “Capitalism,” and “Music” are the episodes that have been released at the time of this writing. But all the snazzy production in the world can’t hide the tendentious deceptions at the foundation of the 1619 Project.
Episode one introduces the series and reintroduces the principles of the project, mainly in the person of Nikole Hannah-Jones. The theme running through the first episode, “Democracy,” is continuity: Hannah-Jones’s continuous struggle with her father’s decision to fly an American flag, and the continuous struggle of black men and women for an equal place in the political life of the United States. She travels to a stop on the Underground Railroad and also to the Mississippi Delta, where the viewer meets MacArthur Cotton, an activist who participated in the civil-rights movement in its heyday. The suggestion made by the episode is that things haven’t really changed since the 1960s as much as most Americans might think (and it’s up to Hannah-Jones to reveal the prevailing, seedy underbelly of American racism). The episode also includes Hannah-Jones’s own controversies and the pushback the 1619 Project itself received. There are clearly charming moments in the show — Cotton comes across as affable, intense, and devoted to his cause — but by focusing on the civil-rights era and the Civil War, there’s undoubtedly a broader story of black life being ignored.
The second episode, aptly titled “Race,” tells the story of Virginia, from the arrival of the first enslaved people to the Loving decision and beyond. Yet while Virginia features prominently in the narrative, a more sophisticated inquiry into the various motivations to sustain slavery in the Old Dominion is nowhere to be found. Instead, we’re told the racial legacy of Virginia and slavery were perpetuated to defend white supremacy. Whatever degree of truth embodies that claim, the vaporous nature of the term “white supremacy” and the transparent political edge of the show’s maker leaves the viewer less able to understand how racism and slavery endured in the United States but undeniably sure it was the fault of white Americans.
“Music” is the theme of the third episode, and Hannah-Jones’s conversations with musicians Nile Rodgers and Otis Williams reveal the 1619 Project’s creator in her most positive light. When she praises the creativity of black Americans, she is undeniably at her best. Indeed, in many ways, the “Music” episode is the strongest. Black Americans have played a leading role in the creation of distinctively American musical folkways. Hannah-Jones’s assertion that funk and disco were tied to black rebellion against authority is hard to refute. Rodgers was a leader of the Black Panther Party who realized the potential social and political influence contained within particular genres of black American music. He came to the realization that he would advance the Black Panthers’ ideology subtly in dance and music clubs more than he could through the Panthers’ overt political organization.
Ultimately, however, the accolades received by the 1619 Project and the visceral reaction of its creators to any criticism don’t change the fact that the central weakness of the entire venture — that America’s true founding should be seen as the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619 — is based on shoddy history, ahistorical and sometimes contrived associations, and flawed methodology.
More worrisome is the project’s assertions that the United States is somehow an invalid polity created explicitly to protect slavery. Six of the most influential historians of the American Revolution — Gordon Wood, Jack Rakove, Joseph Ellis, Carol Berkin, Jane Calvert, and Richard Brown — wrote an open letter in 2021 challenging the project’s assertion that 18th-century Americans were driven to revolution for the express purpose of supporting chattel slavery. Historians, they rightly noted, “forcefully emphasize the fundamental importance of slavery to American history and the Revolution, including the compliance with slavery at the Federal Convention in 1787.” Still, as Wood, Rakove, and their fellow letter-writers point out, while slavery played a role in colonial North America, the American Revolution “also became a major event in the history of antislavery in the Western world. Not only did the first society with antislavery aims in modern history originate in Revolutionary Philadelphia in 1775, but during the war, some northern states became the first slave-holding political entities in world history to abolish slavery by law.” Free blacks and enslaved peoples “were crucial leaders and actors in these antislavery movements. But no one then believed the colonists precipitated the Revolution out of fear that Britain was going to free the slaves in its empire; and no one should believe it now.”
Revolutionary-era policy-makers realized that the ideals of 1776 had some bearing on how to treat enslaved peoples. It was no coincidence that, while all 13 colonies tolerated slavery in 1776, by 1800 most of the northern states had passed laws providing for either outright abolition or for gradual emancipation. Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary-era constitution declared, “We conceive that it is our duty . . . to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended to us, and release them from that thralldom, to which we ourselves were tyrannically doomed.”
Pennsylvanians, for instance, tied the ideas of the American Revolution directly to the eventual freedoms of black Americans. It was not for Pennsylvanians to ask why there were different races, but it was important for the state to recognize that all of them “are the work of the almighty Hand.” Similarly, New York State emancipation provisions, said Arthur Zilversmit, historian and author of The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North, “implicitly recognized the connection between abolition and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
Yet the 1619 Project refuses to acknowledge the history of abolition and emancipation in northern states because racial inequality was not immediately actuated by northern liberty laws. This is a laughable rejection of normative historical processes in the service of presentist moralizing. The 1619 Project would annihilate the commemoration and memory of every single gain made in the march toward the history of emancipation and black freedom because those gains do not conform to the sociopolitical standards of the 2020s. It is, in fact, a rejection of the history of black American freedom, not an embrace of it.
This has led to the warped polemic whereby Hannah-Jones nationalizes the history of Virginia and the South and applies it to the entire United States. This, ironically, is exactly what John C. Calhoun and the slaveholding Fire-Eaters attempted once they realized that — far from slavery being on the march in the Union — there were free states and people willing to reject slavery and embrace, albeit incrementally, more-egalitarian ideals on race and slavery at the federal level. Calhoun and the Fire-Eaters loathed the Declaration of Independence because it publicly committed the American regime to ideals fundamentally at odds with slaveholding and even black social inequality. Because of the ideals of 1776, Calhoun’s own warped version of a 1619 project didn’t work, and by 1861, his fellow Southerners knew it (with the Union slanting toward freedom, Southern slaveholders with a perpetual commitment to black inequality had to escape the Union while they still could).
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln told an audience in Illinois that they would search “in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” Washington never denied that the Declaration implied equality for blacks; neither did any other president. No members of Congress denied it. It was only once Southerners knew that slavery was finished that they began to argue that eventual black equality was not a consideration for the Revolutionary generation.
Many may watch the 1619 documentary, reviewers may applaud it, and Hannah-Jones may make more money. But it’s a story that’s less about black freedom and more about returning to a dead polemic upheld by slaveholders in order to tear down the very ideals that they knew would eventually free black men and make them equal. Calhoun’s 1619 project died, and black men became, slowly but surely, free. Maybe it’s time for this 1619 project to die, too.