Read and summarize each of the readings (excerpts from the 1619 Project) listed below, separately, in at least 3-4 sentences:? ? After completing the readings, make sur

�ur founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black �mericans fought to make them true. �ithout this struggle, �merica would have no democracy at all.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

�rtwork by Adam Pendleton

�ugust 18, 2019

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�he 1619 �roject

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My dad always fl ew an American fl ag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two- story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that fl ag always fl ew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal gov- ernment, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an alu- minum pole, soared the fl ag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plan- tation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t- see- in- the- morning to can’t- see- at- night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subju- gated its near- majority black pop- ulation through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mis- sissippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such ‘‘crimes’’ as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black peo- ple in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or fi nd work other than toiling in the cotton fi elds or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the fl ood of black Southerners fl eeing North. She got o� the Illinois Central Rail- road in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason- Dixon line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to fi nd promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he

signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might fi nal- ly treat him as an American.

The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunt- ed. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that fl ag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen fi rsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citi- zens, proudly fl y its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the fl ag wasn’t really ours, that our his- tory as a people began with enslave- ment and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Amer- icans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague con- nection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that fl ag. He knew that our people’s contributions to build- ing the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans land- ed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The

pirates had stolen them from a Por- tuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migra- tion in human history until the Sec- ond World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through back- breaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, account- ing for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Je� erson and James Madison, sprawling proper- ties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe cap- tivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the rail- roads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revo- lution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second- richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island ‘‘slave trader.’’ Profi ts from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay o� its war debts and fi nanced some of our most prestigious uni- versities. It was the relentless buy- ing, selling, insuring and fi nancing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the fi nancial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inac- curate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast materi- al wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ and ‘‘endowed by their Creator with cer- tain unalienable rights.’’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hun- dreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’’ did not apply to fully one-fi fth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through cen- turies of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights strug- gles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and dis- ability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic e� orts of black Amer- icans, our democracy today would most likely look very di� erent — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very fi rst person to die for this country in the American Revo- lution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that fi rst one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American

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story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabas- ter in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘‘founding fathers.’’ And that no people has a greater claim to that fl ag than us.

In June 1776, Thomas Je� erson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: ‘‘We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’’ For the last 243 years, this fi erce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self- governance has defi ned

our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Je� erson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Je� erson’s wife, born to Martha Je� erson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Je� erson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced- labor camp he called Monti- cello, to accompany him to Philadel- phia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fi fth of the pop- ulation within the 13 colonies strug- gled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved peo- ple were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Je� erson’s fel- low white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured

that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolition- ist William Goodell wrote in 1853, ‘‘If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.’’

Enslaved people could not legal- ly marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own chil- dren, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised ‘‘Negroes for Sale.’’ Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their

An 1872 portrait of African-Americans serving in Congress (from left): Hiram Revels, the first black man elected to the Senate; Benjamin S. Turner; Robert C. De Large; Josiah T. Walls; Jefferson H. Long; Joseph H. Rainy; and R. Brown Elliot.

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property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, includ- ing by those working for Je� erson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profi ts for the white people who owned them.

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devic- es was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplic- ity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Sam- uel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American inde- pendence, quipped, ‘‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology 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. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply confl icted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemi- sphere. In London, there were grow- ing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the econo- my of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prom- inence that allowed Je� erson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break o� from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profi ts generated by chat- tel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order

to ensure that slavery would con- tinue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s fi rst 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Je� erson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypoc- risy. And so in Je� erson’s original draft of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the tra� cking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Je� erson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the fi nal Declaration of Inde- pendence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the

Constitution, the framers careful- ly constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Wald streicher has written, and fi ve more hold implications for slavery. The Con- stitution protected the ‘‘property’’ of those who enslaved black peo- ple, prohibited the federal govern- ment from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people

A postcard showing the scene at the murder of Allen Brooks, an African-American laborer who was accused of attempted rape. He was dragged through the streets around the Dallas County Courthouse and lynched on March 3, 1910. Postcards of lynchings were not uncommon in the early 20th century.

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be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the ‘‘we’’ in the ‘‘We the People’’ was not a lie.

On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere fi ve years after the nation’s highest courts declared that no black person could

be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of fi ve esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who

had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplat- ing whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white

who had run away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Byron called out the deceit, saying of the Con- stitution, ‘‘The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.’’

With independence, the found- ing fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful par- adox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist sci- ence and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Ameri- cans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, wheth- er they engaged in slavery or not, ‘‘had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.’’ While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural sta- tion of people who had any discern- ible drop of ‘‘black’’ blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a ‘‘slave’’ race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the ‘‘Negro race,’’ the court ruled, was ‘‘a sep- arate class of persons,’’ which the founders had ‘‘not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government’’ and had ‘‘no rights which a white man was bound to respect.’’ This belief, that black peo- ple were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever

Isaac Woodard and his mother in South Carolina in 1946. In February that year, Woodard, a decorated Army veteran, was severely beaten by the police, leaving him blind.

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volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fi ght for their own liberation. The presi- dent was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fi ght against their former ‘‘masters.’’ But Lincoln wor- ried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a ‘‘trou- blesome presence’’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. ‘‘Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?’’ he had said four years earlier. ‘‘My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.’’

That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly creat- ed position called the commission- er of emigration. This was to be his fi rst assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropri- ate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.

‘‘Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the fi rst question for proper consideration,’’ Lincoln told them. ‘‘You and we are di� erent races. . . . Your race su� er very greatly, many of them, by liv- ing among us, while ours su� er from your presence. In a word, we su� er on each side.’’

You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momen- tarily stole the breath of these fi ve black men. It was 243 years to the month since the fi rst of their

ancestors had arrived on these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white peo- ple insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting o� , yet black men had signed up to fi ght. Enslaved people were fl eeing their forced- labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the e� ort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. ‘‘Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other . . . without the institution of slavery and the col- ored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,’’ the presi- dent told them. ‘‘It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.’’

As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would con- sult on his proposition. ‘‘Take your full time,’’ Lincoln said. ‘‘No hurry at all.’’

A demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black suffrage.

Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Rob- ert E. Lee surrendered at Appomat- tox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Amer- icans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some decades before: ‘‘This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. . . . Here we were born, and here we will die.’’

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s o� er to aban- don these lands is an astounding tes- tament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, ‘‘Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestion- ing faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.’’ Black Americans had long called for universal equal- ity and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, ‘‘that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.’’ Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppres- sors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one of the nation’s fi rst human rights organizations — to fi ght dis- crimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for the fi rst time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal o� ces. Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Rev- els of Mississippi, who became the fi rst black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the fi rst black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until

�ugust 18, 2019

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Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took o� ce in 1967.) More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equi- table tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in pub- lic transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of Ameri- can institutions: the public school. Public education e� ectively did not exist in the South before Recon- struction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were des- perate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state- funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the fi rst compulsory educa- tion laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just fi ve years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefl y, attended schools together.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, mak- ing the United States one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year, black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white leg- islators to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s fi rst such law and one of the most expansive pieces of civil

rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It codifi ed black American citizenship for the fi rst time, pro- hibited housing discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts and

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