The 1619 Cover-up: Did the 1619 Project cover-up a major legal precedent to avoid blaming the victim?

 

Last year the New York Times Magazine published – The 1619 Project – to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first “enslaved Africans” to Britain’s Virginia colony in 1619. 

Its lead essay, by editor Nikole Hannah-Jones, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The Pulitzer Prize center adapted the 1619 Project for K-12 curriculums and its being used in thousands of schools. 

However, Hannah-Jones promoted two controversial ideas that critics believe should not be taught in classrooms.

1).  The arrival of “enslaved Africans” in 1619 marked the beginning of America.  Therefore, the founding date of the country is 1619 and not 1776. 

2).  Hannah-Jones stated, “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonist decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” 

Prominent historians accused Hannah-Jones of inaccuracy.  Hannah-Jones responded, “The 1619 project is not history.  It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative.”   The historians and Hannah-Jones debated details and dates, but the actual status of the “first Africans” wasn’t debated, or even questioned. 

The 1619 Project asserted the ship that docked in Virginia carried “enslaved Africans” who were sold to the colonist.  But, Adolph Reed, a black political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told an interviewer that assertion was a lie.  The Africans weren’t enslaved, they were actually indentured servants who were freed after their indentured time expired. 

Reed was ignored for making a technical distinction.

Again, Hannah-Jones explained, “The 1619 Project explicitly denies objectivity. We stated in the intro this was a reframing of history,” and, “The fight here is about who gets to control the national narrative, and therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself, one group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism.” 

If the past is a recorded narrative by the victors, then the 1619 Project is a narrative according to the victims.

In 1971 psychologist William Ryan coined the phrase “blaming the victim” to discredit Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report – The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.  According to Ryan, theories that divert responsibility from social structures to behavior or cultural patterns of the marginalized blame the victim. 

However, by the end of the 20^th century, the concept of “blaming the victim” has gone beyond its original intent and is used specifically to censor sensitive subjects.  The mention of “the victim’s” slightest role – in any event – is considered unconscionable, especially in historical events like slavery.  For example, it’s constantly repeated that Africans were kidnapped by Europeans and forced into slavery, but any mention of the fact African tribal chiefs sold Africans to Europeans blames the victim and is improper to discuss.

By labeling the first Africans “enslaved” instead of indentured servants, the 1619 Project can be accused of engaging in a cover-up similar to how – kidnapping – covered up African tribal chiefs selling Africans.  If the Africans are “enslaved” upon arrival, then the 1619 Project can ignore disturbing events that happened in the time between indentured servitude and chattel slavery. 

For instance, in historian Phillip S. Foner’s: History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom, he described the Johnson v. Parker case.

Anthony Johnson was “the black patriarch” of the first community of Negro property owners in America … Although their number was relatively small, the very existence of Negro property owners in seventeenth-century Virginia reveals that for an early period of time, blacks were financially able either to pay for the transportation of indentured servants from Europe or Africa or both, or to purchase property from native Virginians… Some Negro servants were forced to serve for life by masters who simply refused to acknowledge that the period of indenture was completed. A precedent-setting case was that of Johnson v. Parker (1654) in Northampton County, involving John Casor, the black servant of Anthony Johnson, Virginia’s first free Negro.

In 1653 Casor complained to Robert Parker, a white planter who was visiting Johnson, that he was indentured to Johnson, but Johnson kept him seven years longer than he should have.  Johnson insisted that Casor was his servant for life, but Johnson was warned if he didn’t release Casor from servitude, Casor could recover Johnson’s cows as damages. Johnson freed Casor.  Then Casor bound himself to Parker.  Johnson petitioned the Northampton County court for the return of “his servant”, and in March 1654, the court ordered Casor returned to Johnson and handed down the judgment that Casor was Johnson’s servant for life, that is, his slave. 

This was the first civil suit in the Thirteen Colonies to declare a person of African descent a slave for life.  It also established the right of free blacks to own slaves.

Foner also stated:

Some historians believe that slavery may have existed from the very first arrival of the Negro in 1619, but others are of the opinion that the institution did not develop until the 1660s and that the status of the Negro until then was that of an indentured servant. Still others believe that the evidence is too sketchy to permit any definite conclusion either way.

But Ulrich B. Phillips, historian of Southern slavery, gave the best explanation.  Phillips stated, “The first comers were slaves in the hands of their maritime sellers; but they were not fully slaves in the hands of their Virginia buyers for there was neither law nor custom then establishing the institution of slavery in the colony.”

With that said, the 1619 Project might not be guilty of a cover-up, but it definitely washed its hands clean of a free black man’s contribution to slavery.  The 1619 Project’s editor probably believed it was unconscionable to taint their narrative with such an anomaly, but that doesn’t help American students know the full story of slavery.