Nicole Hannah-Jones’s brilliant and compelling introductory essay for the 1619 Project deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Her essay met all the scholarship requirements of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism which awarded her the Pulitzer. Hannah-Jones places “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Racists like Trump felt threatened by the 1619 Project, and in response commissioned the 1776 Project which had no recognized experts in American history.
Before being disbanded, the 1776 Project issued one report that historians widely condemned for “inaccuracies, distortions, lies” and for alleged plagiarism. Professor Jacqueline Antonovich wrote of this report recommended by Joseph Mendola that “there are no footnotes/endnotes or bibliography.” It has no academic credibility, a right-wing political diatribe. Mendola accuses Hannah-Jones of “falsehoods” but his accusations have no validity as Adam Serwer of The Atlantic wrote the suffering and resistance of slaves was “far from the welcoming arms of northern abolitionists” they were mostly going it alone. Hannah-Jones did not call Lincoln a racist. Perhaps her view of him is similar to that of W.E.B. Du Bois who wrote “the world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: see this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”
John Hancock
Concord