Abraham Lincoln statues

[David Lockmiller]

The 1619 Chronicles

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist for the New York Times
October 9, 2020

Bret Stephens wrote in part:

An early sign that the project was in trouble came in an interview last November with James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”

In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”

McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”

In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”

It is time that the 2020 Pulizer Board Prize for Commentary be rescinded for just cause!!!

And, the people who recently tore down the statue of President Lincoln in Portland should be informed in detail of the cause for this disgrace and also be dispelled of the false and misleading information that they had been told regarding all of the actions taken by President Abraham Lincoln in the course of the execution of the "Dakota 38". (See the photo at my Post #18. Thank you, Roger.)