By Bill
Donohue, Catholic League president
Coming
on the heels of a bloody summer, much of it driven by racially charged rhetoric
and behavior, the new school year has begun. But not without calls to address
racism. Elementary and secondary students are being primed to learn about
America's irredeemably racist past, present, and future.
The
favorite resource for educators is the "1619 Project." It is a
proposed curriculum being disseminated by the New York Times that
seeks to revise American history. According to this version, America was not
founded in a revolution in 1776; it was founded in slavery in 1619.
This
vision of the Founding is now working its way into school curricula across the
nation. It has been formally adopted in Chicago, D.C., Buffalo, Newark,
Wilmington, and Winston-Salem. Thousands of classrooms around the nation will
implement this radical interpretation of American history.
The
"1619 Project" is the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her contribution
is not the result of her training: She is neither a historian or a professor.
She is a journalist. And while she complains about systemic racism,
Hannah-Jones, whose mother is white and father is black, insisted that no white
people work with her on the Project.
Prominent
historians of America's founding have panned her work. In a letter that these
leading scholars signed, they charged the "1619 Project" with "a
displacement of historical understanding by ideology." Pulitzer Prize
winning historian Gordon Wood accused this initiative of being "so wrong
in many ways." Another winner of this prize, James McPherson, said that it
"left most of the history out."
Hillsdale
College president Larry Arnn succinctly summed up the problem with
Hannah-Jones' creative enterprise. The "1619 Project," he said, is
"an ideological campaign to undermine Americans' attachment to our
founding principles and to the Constitution by making slavery—rather than the
principles of liberty that ended slavery and preserved our liberties for nearly
250 years—the principal focus of American history."
Students
will be taught that Africans were forcibly taken from their homeland and
brought to the New World as slaves. They will not be taught that slavery has
existed in every part of the globe, and that Africans were bought by
Europeans from their African slavemasters; they were not captured. Nor will
students learn that slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but it
took until 1981 for Africa to make it illegal (it still exists in parts of
Africa today).
Most
important, students will not learn that the Founders could have decided
to justify slavery, making no overtures toward liberty. That is what virtually
every other nation has done. Instead, they crafted the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution, the net effect of which was to lay the
philosophical and legal foundation for the eventual demise of slavery. The
Civil War was fought precisely to realize the Founders' vision of liberty.
No
nation has made more progress in realizing equal opportunity than the United
States. We recently twice elected a black president and have done more to end
systemic racism than any other nation. One of the reasons why so many people
want to come to our shores—often illegally—is because we are the envy of the
world. It is our unparalleled freedom and prosperity that draws so many
minorities to come here. But none of this will be taught to students subjected
to the "1619 Project."
To
make matters worse, the New York Times has no moral leg to
stand on. The following report was sent to all schools in the six states listed
above that have adopted the "1619 Project." The version that the
schools received included an introductory note.
"1619
PROJECT":
PROPOSED
REVISION
The New
York Times rolled out its "1619 Project" on the alleged
racist origins of the United States with great fanfare. It would be inexcusably
hypocritical not to include the newspaper's own contribution to racism in
classroom instructions.
The
family that owned the New York Times were slaveholders. To
wit: Bertha Levy Ochs, the mother of the paper's patriarch, Adolph S. Ochs, was
a rabid advocate of slavery, continuing a tradition set by her slave-owning
uncle. She lived with her father's brother, John Mayer (he dropped the surname
Levy), for several years in Natchez, Mississippi before the Civil War. He owned
at least five slaves.
Ochs'
parents, Julius and Bertha Levy, were German Jewish immigrants who met in the
South before moving to Ohio (where Adolph was born). When the Civil War broke
out, Bertha wanted to be actively engaged in her pro-slavery efforts and moved
to Memphis to support her Confederate-fighting brother (Julius was on the Union
side).
When
Bertha died, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, to which she belonged,
draped a Confederate flag over her coffin. Adolph even donated $1,000 to have
her name engraved on the founders' roll of the Stone Mountain Confederate
Memorial. He sent a note saying, "Robert E. Lee was her idol."
Adolph
was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and at age 20 he became the publisher of
the Chattanooga Times. In 1900, the paper ran an editorial saying
that the Democratic Party, which he supported, "may justly insist that the
evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them." After he
purchased the New York Times in 1896, he moved to New York.
When he died in 1935, the United Daughters of the Confederacy sent a gift to be
placed in his coffin.
Most
Americans are mature enough not to blame the New York Times today
for the racist beliefs and practices of its ancestry. In doing so, they show
prudence. But are they too generous in their assessment? According to the
wisdom of the "1619 Project," they are absolutely too forgiving.
If
this were all there was to the racist history of the New York Times,
we could give it a pass. But we cannot. Its racist record runs deep.
In
1910, the Times covered a heavyweight boxing match between the
black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and Jim Jeffries, the
former heavyweight champion who came out of retirement for the fight.
Jeffries, dubbed the "Great White Hope," was expected to win. He
lost.
The
sports writers for the Times put their money on Johnson, but
not before issuing a dire warning. "If the black man wins, thousands and
thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying
claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white
neighbors." In other words, stupid blacks might want political, economic
and social rights as well, and that would not be auspicious.
In the
1920s, after a race riot in Washington, a Times editorial
waxed nostalgic, speaking about conditions prior to the Great War (World War
I.) "The majority of Negroes in Washington before the Great War were well
behaved," adding that in those happy days, "most of them admitted the
superiority of the white race and troubles between the two races were unheard
of." They wanted more than "mere physical equality."
Also
in the 1920s, Adolph Ochs invited a black singer, Roland Hayes, to lunch at
the New York Times. His father, Julius, was so angry he left the
building. According to Iphigene, Adolph's progressive daughter, Julius believed
that while "we love the Negroes," it is important to "keep them
in their place; they are fine as long as they stay in the kitchen."
In
1931, in one of the most infamous racist events in the 20th century, two white
woman accused nine black teens of rape. It turned out to be totally false.
Adolph's Chattanooga Times was quick to condemn the alleged
rapists. An editorial read, "Death Penalty Properly Demanded in Fiendish
Crime of Nine Burly Negroes." The trial reporter for the paper called the
defendants "beasts unfit to be called human."
Matters
did not change throughout the 1940s. The NAACP, while noting that this southern
arm of the New York Times was somewhat better than its
competitors, it was still "anti-Negro." That is because the papers
were in the hands of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. While on a Red Cross tour of
England during World War II, he expressed horror at the sight of black American
soldiers "fraternizing" with white women. "Rape by Negroes is
just one degree worse than by whites, and black illegitimate children just one
degree more unfortunate than white ones." That is what he told General
Dwight Eisenhower.
Arthur's
workplace policies were also tinged with racism. A Newspaper Guild survey taken
in the 1950s found that of the 75,000 newsroom employees he commanded, just 38
were black. Bad as he was, he was still better than other family members. He
fought, successfully, to end the practice by the Chattanooga
Times of publishing racially segregated obituaries.
Even
though those who ran the New York Times made progress with
racial relations in the 1960s and 1970s, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. said in the
1980s that the paper was "just miserable to women, miserable to
blacks."
It was
miserable to blacks in another way. By championing the life of Margaret Sanger,
a notorious racist, it shows, and continues to show, how much further it needs
to go before its racist past is behind it.
Sanger,
the founder of Planned Parenthood, referred to blacks as "weeds" and
"human waste" in need of "extinction." But to the
august New York Times, she was known in 1980 as a
"modern heroine." At the end of the decade, she was cited as a
"legendary pioneer." In 1992, she was labeled a "strong-willed
woman." In 2006, the eugenicist was branded "courageous," and in
2014 was noted as a "pioneering feminist."
Never
once did the New York Times call Margaret Sanger out for what
she was—a white racist who lied to the public about her real motives. "We
don't want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro
population." She had little to worry about—the "newspaper of
record" kept the truth from the public. It still does.
It's
not just the defense of notorious racists that bedevils the newspaper—it has
been accused of promoting racism in its workplace.
In
2016 two black female employees in their sixties filed a class-action lawsuit
against Mark Thompson, the CEO of the New York Times Company. They argued that
"deplorable discrimination" exists in the workplace.
"Unbeknownst to the world at large," their deposition says, "not
only does the Times have an ideal customer (young, white, wealthy), but also an
ideal staffer (young, white, unencumbered with a family) to draw that purported
ideal customer."
For
all of these reasons, any school that adopts the "1619 Project" as a
model to discuss the history of racism in the United States has a moral
obligation to inform students of the racist legacy of the New York
Times. Not to do so would be intellectually dishonest. If we are to have a
national conversation about race, we must tell the truth about the role that
this newspaper has played in contributing to racism in the United States.
