The 1619 Project (in the New York Times Magazine)

[David Lockmiller]

“Five professors say the 1619 Project should be amended. ‘We disagree,’ says the New York Times.”
Washington Post article by Katie Mettler Dec. 22, 2019

The project [was] conceived and shepherded by Times Magazine writer and MacArthur Foundation fellow Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Those errors, the five professors say, include an assertion in Hannah-Jones’s essay, which leads the project, about the events that preceded the American Revolution. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” Hannah-Jones wrote, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

In their correction request, the professors called this “not true” and wrote that “if supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”

The professors also questioned Hannah-Jones’s presentation of Lincoln’s views on racial equality, calling it “misleading” because it “ignores” some of his documented assertions about the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

The Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein recounted Hannah-Jones’s reporting, placing it in the greater context of the goals of the 1619 Project. He wrote:

“She (Nikole Hannah-Jones) provides an important historical lesson by simply reminding the public, which tends to view Lincoln as a saint, that for much of his career, he believed that a necessary prerequisite for freedom would be a plan to encourage the four million formerly enslaved people to leave the country. . . . Yet the story of abolition becomes more complicated, and more instructive, when readers understand that even the Great Emancipator was ambivalent about full black citizenship.”

Silverstein wrote in his response that the professors’ letter was the magazine’s “first major request for correction” regarding the 1619 Project but that the Times has welcomed critique from those acting in good faith and has decided to incorporate some of that feedback into the expanding book.

“You do not produce a project like this and not expect pushback,” Hannah-Jones tweeted about the correction request. Hannah-Jones said she has engaged with and “taken … to heart” critical scholars who reached out to her directly, but she said none of the five professors who wrote the correction request did that.

The purpose of the project, Silverstein wrote, was to “expand the reader’s sense of the American past.”