The controversial 1619 Project is named for the year the first black slaves arrived in the American colonies. It was an idea of New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones (pictured below), who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work even though numerous historians fact-checked her claim America was founded to preserve slavery in the colonies.
A key claim of the 1619 Project is preserving slavery was a major reason America broke away from England and King George. That is also a claim numerous notable historians have vigorously disputed, but it’s important to Hannah-Jones and her defenders because it describes a sinister reason for the country’s founding rather than the themes of freedom and individual liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
A new book on the topic is “The 1619 Project Myth,” written by economic historian Phillip Magness. In his book, Magness disputes the claim that cotton, and the slaves who picked it, represented two major economic factors in the America’s new economy. In reality, he says, cotton represented about five percent of the economy at the time, meaning slavery was not as essential as the 1619 Project claims.
Magness’s book got the attention of The College Fix, the higher-ed watchdog that documents left-wing ideology on college and university campuses.
College Fix editor Micaiah Bilger tells AFN Magness and his book provide “conclusive evidence” slavery was not the driving mechanism claimed in the 1619 Project.
“He really debunks lots of ideas in the 1619 Project,” Bilger advises, “that are still affecting education today."
Magness, who was interviewed by the Fix, said tying America's founding to slavery is a key part of the 1619 Project. That's because doing so is used by Hannah-Jones and others to justify income distribution and reparations to atone for America’s past.
“In order to make the arguments for wealth redistribution, or tearing down capitalism in the present day,” the historian explained, “they do need certain claims that they’ve made about the past to be true, one of which is that the cotton sector and plantation slavery more broadly were the engines of American wealth in the 19th century.”
Among the many critics, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood has disputed the key claim the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery in the new colonies. He called that an “inaccurate reading of history.”
Carol Berkin, an early-American historian, wrote a Washington Post article to also criticize the claim preserving slavery was a main cause of the American Revolution.
Other notable historians have criticized the 1619 Project including Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and Kevin Gannon.
