LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The 1619 Project came onto the scene in August of 2019 with a special issue of The New York Times to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people arriving in America. It included essays and creative works by journalists, historians and artists and according to their website, it was created to illuminate “the legacy of slavery in the contemporary United States” and highlight the “contributions of Black Americans to every aspect of American society.”

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Since then, it has become a controversial project that has been criticized and exposed by many historians as portraying inaccurate historical facts and being selective about the information used to further a political and social narrative. Many have called it an effort to reframe America’s history in order to tear down authentic American history.

An article written by the American Thinker, a daily online conservative magazine dealing with American politics, explained the 1619 Project this way, “The major premise of the Project is based upon a lie. It claims America was birthed in slavery in 1619 when the first 20 African slaves disembarked at Jamestown. It claims America was not a nation, ‘conceived in liberty,’ as Abraham Lincoln intoned, but instead a White, racist state begat through the original sin of slavery. However, Jamestown was founded by a British company over a decade before the introduction of slaves; its purpose was to search for gold and establish trade to enrich its owners, not give freedom to anyone.”

The article goes on to say, “Slavery was not introduced to ‘America’ by Whites at Jamestown. The Native American tribes here had a long history of enslaving each other and once Blacks arrived, they enslaved them too.”

Regardless of the many outlined factual inaccuracies of the 1619 Project, the Michigan Council of Teachers of English (MCTE) is promoting an Oakland University professional development conference on their Facebook page that trains teachers how to use this revisionist-history in their teachings to middle school and high school students. In the post, MCTE asks for contributors for a “Teaching Race in America Conference” in August and solicits topics including Black Lives Matter, banned books, the assault on voting rights, border security, slavery, and lynching.

The MCTE organization provides professional development for English language arts teachers and English education professors throughout the state and their purpose is to promote the better teaching of English Language Arts in the state of Michigan. Their mission is to support and celebrate K-16 educators with organizational initiatives designed to create successful learning models for Michigan’s students. They foster information-sharing, professional development, and networking with other state literacy groups and local writing projects.

Founded in 1922, the MCTE is a state affiliate of NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English. MCTE has a commitment on the home page of their website that says, “We affirm our support for NCTE’s statement against racism and commit ourselves as an organization to use our platform to advance antiracist programming to bring humanity and dignity to our colleagues, our schools, our state, and all our students.”

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The NCTE statement referred to was released in June of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The organization said they “stand in solidarity with demonstrations and protests that raise awareness of, and that call for action against, systemic racism in this country.” They go on to say “Racist acts keep recurring, and systems of oppression continue to exist, proving the need for systemic and structural change.” They list their vision as a long-held commitment to “to apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity for all students and the educators who serve them.”

The MCTE announcement for “Teaching Race in America Conference” class asks “How do we discuss the nation’s racial past and present in our classrooms and communities?” and “How should teachers respond to those who want to exclude any discussion of systemic racism in our history, our culture, our institutions and our economy?”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the keynote presenter, will be answering those questions and many more at the August 9th conference in southeast Michigan. Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning investigative reporter who was the creator of the 1619 Project for the New York Times. Her website says that “Nikole lectures all over the U.S. and across the globe on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its legacy, including giving a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in 2022.”

And although she’s dedicated her career to writing about racial inequality, Hannah-Jones demanded that Whites be excluded from the Project. She got her way. The NYT reported that “almost every contributor in the magazine and special section (writers, photographers and artists) is Black.”

The 1619 Project has been debunked by many scholars, including twelve Civil War historians and political scientists who sent a letter to the NYT, which the editor refused to publish. Included in the letter they said, “The 1619 Project offers a historically-limited view of slavery, especially since slavery was not just (or even exclusively) an American malady, and grew up in a larger context of forced labor and race.” They continued, “We are also dismayed by the problematic treatment of major issues and personalities of the Founding and Civil War eras.” The signers of the letters are from Princeton, Yale and other universities including Michigan State University. William B. Allen, a Black man and emeritus dean and professor at MSU was one of the signers. Because these scholars thought the project might be used in schools (and they were right) they had asked the NYT to withhold publishing and distributing the contents until their concerns were addressed thoroughly.

Over the years, Hannah-Jones has made many inflammatory public comments. When discussing the rioting that happened after the murder of George Floyd, she told CBSN in June 2020, “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.”

Hannah-Jones also wrote an article for the NYT called “What is Owned” calling for Black reparations. In the article, she says that the only solution to the pervasive wealth gap between Black and White Americans and systemic violence and racism is reparations. $14 trillion to be exact.

What some have called the most egregious allegations and statements coming from Hannah-Jones were when she was a student at Notre Dame University. She wrote a letter-to-the-editor titled “Modern savagery” that was published in the November 21, 1995 edition of “The Observer.” She said, “The White race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world.” She also said that Christopher Columbus is “no different then (sic) Hitler.”

She continued to say, “The White race used deceit and trickery, warfare and rape, to steal the land from the people that had lived here for thousands and thousands of years…Even today, the descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos. and continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities.”