The 1619 Project was not a legal claim. It did not declare that the nation was born in bondage. What it said—plainly—was that America’s founding ideals were inseparable from its founding crimes. Black Americans were not passengers. They were agents. Not beneficiaries—Builders.
1/13
#history #blackmastodon #histodons #blackandwhite #photography #photo
Image: The book by Nikole Hannah-Jones at a bookstore on November 17, 2021 in New York City (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images).
This claim did not pass unnoticed. Some objected to the evidence. Some debated the footnotes. They questioned whether the Revolution was driven by slavery. Whether capitalism owed its shape to sugar, cotton, and debt. Fair questions. The Project invited them. But that wasn’t the backlash. The problem wasn’t the claim.
It was the claimant.
2/13
Image: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Source: Alice Vergueiro/Wikimedia Commons.
It had happened before. In 1913, Congressman John Roy Lynch published The Facts of Reconstruction. He had lived it. Fought for it. But James Ford Rhodes—white, distant, unbloodied—was called “objective.” Rhodes' version prevailed. That was enough.
3/13
Image: Congressman John Roy Lynch before 1920, Source: Library of Congress.
Image: Lynch, John Roy. The Facts of Reconstruction. New York, The Neale Publishing Company, 1913. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/14000471/
It happened again in 1935. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction. Meticulous. Monumental. The academy called it too moral. Too political. Too polemic. Not objective. The truth, they said, came too soon.
4/13
Image: W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, Source: the National Portrait Gallery. (https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.80.25) Gelatin silver print.
Image: Black Reconstruction in America, 1st Edition cover. Source: https://archive.org/details/blackreconstruc00dubo/mode/1up
Even John Hope Franklin—Calm. Measured. Commanding in the archive—Was treated as the exception, never the peer. He was let in. But reminded: The invitation was conditional.
5/ 13
Image: John Hope Franklin in 1956. Source: Associated Press.
Image: Reconstruction After the Civil War, 1st Edition. Source: https://archive.org/details/reconstructionaf00fran
So when the 1619 Project arrived—Not from Harvard. Not from Oxford. But from the New York Times—from the mouths of Black folk—it wasn’t an aberration. It was an inheritance.
6/13
Image: An advertisement for the sale of roughly 250 enslaved people trafficked into Boston on the Bante Island ship, ca. 1700. Source: https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/boston/#the-port-of-boston
Its power wasn’t just in the content. It was in the placement. It didn’t whisper from the margins. It declared, from the nation’s most visible paper, that slavery wasn’t a footnote. It was structure. Not deviation. Design. That was the rupture.
7/13
European slavers arriving on African Shores. Equal Justice Initiative. Source: https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/transatlantic-report-PDF-web.pdf
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
