The book The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History is a collection of essays and interviews edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman, published by Mehring Books. This book should be read because it exposes a popular twenty first century false narrative that oversimplifies U.S. history into a simple race conflict between conquering whites and helpless blacks. This is akin to a history promoted by what Marcus Garvey called the “Negro intellectuals” of his time who, he writes, were paid to promote a false narrative and false interpretation of history. This book should be read because it exposes the reality that U.S. history was less a conflict between races than it was a conflict between classes. However the shortcoming of this book is that it has an incomplete or confused understanding of Black Nationalism and confuses it for integrationism, clearly defined by Marcus Garvey as the political behavior that reflects a desire to be white or colored. The book confuses Black Nationalism for integrationism at two different parts.
Perhaps the part of the book that contains its central thesis rests in Part III: Polemics, of its five parts (I: Historical Critique, II: Interviews, III: Polemics, IV: Historical Commentary and V: The Crisis of the New York Times’s 1619 Project). In this Part three was “An Analysis of the New York Times’s Reply to Five Historians” written by Eric London and David North, where they write that
“The Democrats obsessive focus on race and identity is aimed at undermining the development of class consciousness” (195)
Every point made in this book supports this overarching argument, which puts Nikole Hannah-Jones at odds with those like Marcus Garvey, Maurice Bishop, Claudia Jones, and C.L.R. James, who see history from a much more nuanced perspective.
In their first article in Part I entitled “The New York Times‘ 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of American and World History,” Niles Niemuth, Thomas Mackaman and David North argue that “racism was the consequence of slavery” without giving Eric Williams credit for arguing this in 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery (7). They later mischaracterized the project, arguing that the 1619 project promotes “a Black Nationalist narrative” when in reality it promotes an “integrationist” narrative. A Black Nationalist narrative would not be a narrative, as Trevon Austin, Bill Van Auken, and David North write in Part V, that would promote a foreign oil company’s exploitation of Black owned land and natural resources, for material profit. If anything, by taking Shell Oil money to promote the message of the 1619 Project, Hannah Jones is promoting an “integrationist” narrative, because she and its proponents use Shell Oil money to integrate into the mainstream popular culture, despite its revisionist history.
In his book Black Awakening in Capitalist America, sociologist Robert L. Allen writes about the power of Western capital in transforming colonialism into neocolonialism, where the “nationalist native elites…cooperate with their former enemies in subduing and controlling the rebellious colony” (65). Shell Oil has done this across the world, especially among the Ogoni people in Nigeria, as the authors have written. By taking Shell Oil money, which has created this class of “nationalist native elites,” she is a committed integrationist and not, as North and Mackaman claim in their book, “a Black Nationalist.”
By encouraging history to be read simply as a conflict between blacks and whites, which destroys class consciousness and the opportunity to organize constructively against foreign exploitation.
This book should be read because it introduces a variety of narratives of history that question the framing of the 1619 project. Namely, part II: Interviews. In one of their interviews with Victoria Bynum, she tells stories of Southern landowners who chose during the Civil War to fight for the Union Army: Jasper Collins (74). Bynum later cites historians like Margaret Storey and David Williams describing yeoman communities that organized themselves into bands that included poor whites, slaves, and free people of color in common cause against the Confederacy (76).
In the second chapter of his book A History of Pan-African Revolt, C.L.R. James writes that “we have clear evidence that the poor whites of the districts had definitely allied themselves with the Negroes.” This book shows how the 1619 Project completely ignores this aspect of history. Also in this section is their interview with Richard Carwardine who makes the false claim that “taken as a whole, the abolitionist movement of the 1820s and 1830s was largely white,” which ignores the history of Maria W. Stewart, David Walker, and the highly influential preacher Nat Turner (145).
Their interview with Dolores Janiewski quotes Hannah-Jones saying “white southerners of all economic classes…experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people into a quasi-slavery” (164). Albion Tourgee, who this book mentions definitely did not do this, nor did Jasper Collins whom Bynum mentioned. White southerners of all economic classes did not force black people into a quasi-slavery. Some of them worked to destroy what George Jackson called wage slavery.
Part III: Polemics It includes the article “An Analysis of the NYT Reply to Five Historians.” Five historians wrote a letter questioning the claims of the 1619 Project: Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon Wood. The New York Times replied and according to the analysis written by David North and Eric London, this reply was insufficient. The authors of the 1619 project “must still provide an accurate account of the historical context and poiltical constraints which led to the decisions of the Founders. No such analysis is provided by the authors of the 1619 Project. Everything is explained in terms of the alleged racial hatreds of “white” people (186). The article goes on to write that “an economic mode of production based on slavery, which had existed for thousands of years, was abolished through social mass struggle” (187). This part begged mention of the Haitian revolution and how it led to the Louisiana Purchase.
This article contains a very incomplete understanding of Lerone Bennett’s book Forced Into Glory. This is the second time this book mischaracterizes Lerone Bennett’s work as “race-based” without engaging his argument about how Lincoln in fact catered to Southern slaveowners. Lincoln did in fact want to deport all free Blacks to Liberia in order to curb their increasing influence on runaways up to the Civil War. The authors of this article are unable to truthfully engage this. This section of the book makes a powerful point that echoes the aforementioned thesis.
“The justification of the domestic and global interests of American capitalism, the relentless quest for corporate profitability, the effort to suppress the class struggle, and the justification of staggering levels of social inequality are not compatible with the pursuit of historical truth” (197).
This point necessarily questions the standard by which Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer prize for Journalism, especially if it was a journalism that foments racial division and is rewarded with capital from Shell Oil.
This book includes David North’s article “July 4, 1776 in World History” which accurately describes the American Revolution as an “American bourgeois-democratic revolution” that was determined by the existing objective conditions. In this section III is Victoria Bynum’s article “A Historian’s Critique of the 1619 Project” where she writes that Matthew Desmond in his essay on capitalism and slavery “ignores nonslaveowning propertied farmers, the largest class of whites in the antebellum South” (204).
The final section V entitled “The Crisis of the New York Times’s 1619 Project,” includes an article by Eric London and David North where they analyze a speech by Hannah-Jones at NYU, where they write that she argued that “once the Nazis killed the Jews, anti-Semitism disappeared in Germany,” but in the United States “racism has persisted because whites still have to look at and interact with Blacks.” London and North make clear that “it is a well established fact that the vast majority of Nazi officials were never held to account for their crimes.” London and North write:
“Many leading Nazis, including individuals who played a major role in the extermination of the Jews, led successful political, corporate and academic careers after 1945″ (270).
One can argue that the 1619 Project, based on its funding is still in line with a Nazi agenda, especially when one reads the race hatred it is fomenting, especially when one studies how the U.S. government funded neo-Nazis in Ukraine in toppling their democratically elected leader in Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, as Robert Parry wrote in 2014.
The narrative of the 1619 would lead you to believe that history boils down to a racial conflict when in fact, as C.L.R. James has argued it is more a series of class conflicts. As I tweeted on Maurice Bishop’s birthday, using the words of him and Marcus Garvey, I welcome a debate on the historical accuracy of the 1619 Project.
Despite its incomplete understanding of Black Nationalism and Lerone Bennett’s detail of Lincoln’s actual emigration plan for free Blacks before the Civil War, this book is A MUST READ.
