![]() ![]() On the right, a boorish resistance developed that would eventually include everything from the Trump Administration’s error-riddled 1776 Commission report to states’ panicked attempts to purge their school curricula of so-called critical race theory. Impassioned critics emerged at both ends of the political spectrum. (Today you can find a copy on eBay for around a hundred dollars.) Commentators, such as the Vox correspondent Jamil Smith, lauded the Project-which consisted of eleven essays, nine poems, eight works of short fiction, and dozens of photographs, all documenting the long-fingered reach of American slavery-as an unprecedented journalistic feat. ![]() New Yorkers not in the habit of seeking out their Sunday Times ventured to bodegas to nab a hard copy. Seldom these days does a paper edition have such blockbuster draw. ![]() The name of this endeavor was introduced at the very bottom of the page, in print small enough to overlook: “The 1619 Project.” The titular year encapsulated a dramatic claim: that it was the arrival of what would become slavery in the colonies, and not the independence declared in 1776, that marked “the country’s true birth date,” as the issue’s editors wrote. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. ![]()
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