The 1619 Project

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The 1619 Project,” Random House (Large Print), 2021, 739 pp.

This book grew out of the original version of the 1619 Project, which was published in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019.  This book certainly filled in a lot of the history involving blacks that I never before had been exposed to; 1619 is allegedly the date that the first slave arrived in what is now the US, though Africans had been in other parts of North America since the 1500s.  The book aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States national narrative.

The 1619 Project has received criticism from a number of historians, both from the political left and right, who question its historical accuracy.  Scholars denied the project's claim that slavery was essential to the beginning of the American Revolution.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law in July 2021 barring the teaching of critical race theory,  including any materials from the 1619 Project.

Note:  In 1619, a group of "twenty and odd" captive Africans arrived in the Virginia Colony. An English privateer carried 20–30 Africans who had been captured in joint African-Portuguese raids.  Some historians claim that the first enslaved Africans actually were brought to North America in 1526.

My Notes:

Pg. xxv:  A 2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 2017 just 8 percent of US high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, and less than one-third knew that it had taken a constitutional amendment to abolish it.  Considering the confusing and obfuscatory way school curricula tend to address the institution of slavery, this is unsurprising.  As recently as six years ago a McGraw-Hill world geography textbook referred to African people brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships not as the victims of a forced migration but as ‘workers.”

Pg. xxxiv:  Many Historians did not agree with the Projects assertion that one of the primary reasons some colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. 

Pg. xxxviii:  In September 2020, President Trump, who’d railed against the 1619 Project, used an executive order to hastily convene what he called the 1776 Commission.  Written without any input from any scholars who specialize in American history, it sought to reinforce the exceptional nature of our country and to put forth a ‘patriotic’ narrative that downplays racism and inequality and emphasizes a unity predicated on seeing slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial injustice aa aberrations in a fundamentally just and exceptionally free nation.

Pg. 11:  Of the 12 million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas, four hundred thousand were sold into what became the US; the others were sold into other lands that composed South America and the islands.

Pg. 20:  Virginia’s Royal Governor, the Earl of Dunmore, in April 1775 warned the colonists that if they took up arms there, he would ‘declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.’ Enslaved people did not wait for Dunmore to make good on that threat.  By the hundreds they liberated themselves and ran to the British troops.

Pg. 39:  On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation.  It no longer included the mention of colonization, and it also provided for the ability for Black Men to enlist in the Union army.  Eventually, Black men accounted for one in ten Union soldiers, an astounding 78 percent of free Black military-age men living in free states.

Pg. 44:  During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process.  This has often been overlooked, because until 1870 and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which finally granted Black men the right to vote, no Black people had ever been allowed to serve in any elected office in the US Congress or in most states. 

Pg. 46:  In 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, ensuring citizenship to Black Americans and all people born in the US.  (Note: I believe Indians were excluded).

Pg. 49:  In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull the remaining federal troops from the South.  With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction.  The systemic white suppression of Black life proved so severe that this period between the 1880s and the early twentieth century became known as the second slavery (Southerners called it Redemption).

Pg. 51:  Despite the guarantees of equality in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared the racial segregation of Black Americans constitutional. 

Pg. 80:  In 1663 Enslavement became a heritable condition across colonial America (if your Mother was a slave so too were you). 

Pg. 117:  Slave ships traveled a sea route that in its simplest form resembled an isosceles triangle.  Ships departing from England, heading to Africa carrying run, guns, iron bars, clothes and copper pots to trade for people.  Those ships would land in present-day Ghana—Britain’s West African slaving capital—where they would load African captives.  They would then sail across the Atlantic.  This became known as the Middle Passage, since it was the middle leg of the triangular route.  Arriving in Barbados or Jamaica, the ships would exchange people for sugar, molasses, and lumber.  From there they would return home to England, completing the last part of the triangle.  Other forms of the triangular route existed, with stops in the North American colonies to load rice, tobacco, flour, and rum. 

Pg. 176:  If the Confederacy had been a separate nation when the Civil War began, it would have ranked among the richest in the world.  The monetary value of the enslaved population in 1860 was ‘equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country, three times the value of the entire livestock population…twelve times the value of the entire US cotton crop, and forty-eight times the total expenditures of the US federal government that year.

Pg. 182:  Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921:  a mob composed of more than two thousand white men and women commenced a pogrom in the city’s thriving Greenwood District known as Black Wall Street, killing as many as three hundred people and burning more than thirty-five blocks of Black homes and businesses to the ground.

Pg. 217:  The American insistence on crafting treaties with Indians at the national level subordinated Native nations to the American nation (not to the States or territories).  They also underscored a meaningful difference between Native and Black people.  Whereas members of the Native nations were citizens of their own countries, African Americans were citizens of nowhere and undeserving even of the rights of personhood.    

Pg. 236:  Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to remove tribes from their homes and lands east of the Mississippi and relocate them on land west of the river.  On May 28, 1830, President Jackson signed the bill into law. 

Pg. 262:  As a source of the US nation’s financial might, slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.  By the eve of the Civil War, cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export.  The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. 

Pg. 274:  The invention of the cotton gin shortly after ratification of the thirteenth amendment utterly changed American life.  Before the gin, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean; the gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow. 

Pg. 366f:  In the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment formal abolition of slavery in 1865, white Southerners got to work on imposing a slavery-like regime on the newly freed people. 

Pg. 369:  The Fourteenth Amendment put birthright to citizenship on secure footing.  As most of the former Confederate states refused to ratify it, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which mandated the establishment of new governments in the South, with Black men now eligible to vote and hold office, and required ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a condition of readmission into the Union. 

 Pg. 408:  Shortly after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to many in the Confederate leadership.  These men then assumed positions in the newly formed state governments and passed legislation known as the Black Codes.  These laws were designed to reinstall something close to slavery.  They required African Americans to sign a yearly labor contract to work for a white employer, blocked their ability to testify in court against a white person, and banned freed people’s access to and ownership of guns under the threat of a public whipping of thirty-nine lashes.                                                                                                                                                      

Pg. 433:  The US has the highest incarceration rate of any nation on earth: this country contains 4 percent of the planet’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners.  This is a relatively recent development.  In the early 1970s, our prisons and jails held fewer than 350,000 people; since then, that number has increased to about 2.3 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole.  In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 people incarcerated for drug offenses, today that number is about 450,000.  More than 200,000 Americans are currently condemned to life sentences.

Pg. 438ff:  The Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves made some exceptions for those convicted of crimes: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the US or any place subject to their jurisdiction”.  This became useful in keeping previous slaves when convict leasing stripped imprisoned people of any protection and made them completely replaceable and easily discarded.  In that sense, convict leasing became worse than slavery. Recognizing the unbroken links between slavery, Black Codes, lynching, and our current era of mass incarceration is essential.  (In the 1870s, in the period of the so-called Redemption, lawmakers throughout the South enacted Jim Crow laws that stripped Black people of much of their newfound freedom.)

Pg. 446:  Wilmington, North Carolina, November 10, 1898:  A mob of more than one thousand white men overthrows the elected biracial local government in the only successful coup in American history.  Organized by white supremacist politicians virulently opposed to the prospect of elected Black city officials, the mob destroys a thriving Black business district, kills scores of Black people, and drives thousands from their homes.

Pg. 483:  In 1932 the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male commenced with more than 600 subjects, approximately two-thirds of whom had syphilis.  The patients are not told they have this disease; they are not treated for this and were therefore denied drugs that could have saved them.

Pg. 656:  In 2013 Supreme Court, Shelby County v. Holder, decision the Court struck down the federal preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain states and counties with a history of electoral racism to receive federal approval before changing local voting laws or practices.  Voting suppression laws quickly followed and continue to this day.1

Pg. 663:  Along with the invention of the cotton gin and Jefferson’s Louisiana purchase, the number of enslaved Africans swelled by 70 percent, from 697,681 in 1791 to 1,191,362 in 1810, and more than tripled over the next fifty years.

Pg. 704f:  The author states that the lack of wealth in the Black Community is the cause of the continuing problems the Blacks experience.  Black median household income remains, as in 1950, about half that of white Americans. (Pg. 730).

Pg. 708:  Beginning in the 1660s, white officials ensured that all children born to enslaved women would also be enslaved for life and would belong not to their mothers but to the white men who owned their mothers.  This ensured that Blacks could be bought and sold at will to pay debts or buy more acres.

Pg. 722:  White Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950.  (Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.)