1619 Slavery

“We hold these truths to be self evident.” Say these words, and many Americans will be able to recite what follows: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and…

Janelle Monáe stands in a bay in Virginia, the waves lapping at her feet. She is not there as a star on the red carpet – instead she is an advocate for social justice.The commercial for The New York Times’ ‘The 1619 Project’ finds Monae at the water’s edge off…

The New York Times is using one of its most prominent and provocative editorial projects to market itself to current and potential subscribers, starting with movie fans. On Sunday, during the 92nd Academy Awards telecast on ABC, the Times will kick off a nat…

Actor, singer and producer Janelle Monáe can add one more accolade to her bio: the first celebrity to appear in an advertisement for The New York Times. A 30-second commercial from the publisher will run during the Academy Awards on Sunday night, marking the Times’ return to the prominent advertising…

Historical records could help us move toward more constructively addressing slavery’s legacy in the United States, says journalist Rachel L. Swarns. “Growing up in Staten Island, New York, I lived just a few blocks away from a convent that ran a bookstore an…

From the moment Fatima Morrell read The New York Times 1619 Project last year, the educator embraced the 100-page magazine special issue on slavery and racism as a professional godsend. Morrell, an associate superintendent in the Buffalo, New York, school d…

The opening page of the 1619 Project in the New York Times (click on screenshot to go there) by Greg Mayer Last August the New York Times Magazine launched what it called the “1619 Project“. The project’s promoters wish to change the general understanding of American history, and to have…

"Where is home?" the author Sulaiman Addonia says, is a question he finds overrated. Home for him is not a physical place, it’s a feeling one can discover in a lover’s eyes or even a song. Addonia’s beautiful, sensual novel “Silence is My Mother Tongue” is somewhat autobiographical; he was born in Eritrea, raised in a Sudanese refugee camp and spent his teenage years in Saudi…

Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the Slave Trade Act of 1788. In 2015, when Jamelle Bouie and I started thinking of putting together a podcast series on the history of American slavery, it had been one year since the protests in Ferguson, Miss…

Her response, to the AHR editor's sneering, is very strong; an excerpt: Despite your disclaimer that “in principle” being white should not “invalidate” the views of 1619 critics, in fact the skin color of historians critical of the 1619 Project has been scorned (and far worse) over and over again…