The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a worthy augment of American History

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a well-researched and well-written eye-opener that should be part of any American History curriculum at least from fourth grade on if not earlier.

In her opening preface, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes “I was maybe fifteen or sixteen when I first came across the date 1619” and learned that on August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia and were bought by the English colonists.

Sadly, and somewhat embarrassingly, I didn’t learn that either until the New York Times Magazine first published “The 1619 Project” in 2019. It definitely wasn’t taught during my school years in the 1950s and 60s in Southern California. In fact, Jamestown wasn’t very prominent in my history classes as I recall, nor was black enslavement before the Civil War deeply covered.

Back then, I learned more about how Blacks were treated in American history as a latchkey kid watching TV afternoon movies like “Slave Ship” (1937), “Pinky” (1949), “Home Of The Brave” (1949) and “Edge Of The City” (1957) than I did in school.

Those same afternoon movies also taught me that America wasn’t always great nor did it always live up to its ideals. “Bad Day At Black Rock” (1955) showed me that the families of the two Japanese-American girls I knew from 1st through 8th grades had been interred in American concentration camps simply for their race and denied their rights as citizens. “Northwest Passage” (1940) taught that the British during the French and Indian wars (we were British America then) committed biological warfare by giving Native Americans smallpox infested blankets.

American history is fraught with injustice to minorities or those standing in the way of so-called “American progress”: near genocide of Native Americans; enslavement of Blacks; anti-Mormon violence (Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs: "The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State.”); anti-Irish, anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese, anti-Jew, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-labor, anti-anybody but “we red-blooded, right-thinking, god-fearin’, true ’mericans. Yowzah!”

The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States can never come to full fruition without American History telling the complete story, warts and all. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a good first step.