For Black History Month, give '1776' a read
by Washington Examiner February 14, 2020
In celebration of Frederick Douglass’s birthday, the Washington Examiner has published a number of special essays on the topics of race, slavery, and the achievement of the United States’s highest ideals. This represents our collaboration with the Woodson Center to promote its new educational series, “1776.”
This project has brought together “an assembly of independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values.” The writers of these essays, most of them black and all of them serious thinkers, come from ideologically diverse backgrounds. They are liberals, conservatives, academics, journalists, and activists. What they share in common is an aversion to the increasing infantilization of black America or the denial of blacks’ agency throughout their history. These writers share with one another a distaste for attempts at pseudo-scholarship that would reduce all of U.S. history to a history of racism and all of black America to the permanent status of helpless victim.
The name they chose, “1776,” consciously echoes that of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, as it is intended to be an alternative. The flawed premise of that other enterprise was that slavery is not just the original sin that the U.S. has worked to overcome but actually makes up the nation’s foundational character and explains all of the social maladies in black America today.
There are many problems with this concept, as the 1776 authors note. For example, slavery cannot become an explanation for social maladies that didn’t even exist as recently as the civil rights era.
The evil of slavery in the early U.S. and its modern legacy must not be ignored. Slavery was an abomination and, for the founders of this nation, a daily reality. It had existed not since 1619 but from time immemorial. Some of the Founding Fathers embraced and defended this vile institution as it slithered its way into modernity as a form of permanent, race-based subjugation; others tolerated it, some very reluctantly, in the interest of forming what they hoped would become a more perfect union.
This nation has since become just that: more perfect. It was not an easy journey from ownership of blacks to the election of a black president, but the progress is real, as strangely loath as some are to admit it. The journey included the most destructive war in U.S. history in terms of both economic and human costs. It included the vicious lie of “separate but equal,” which abrogated the rule of law for a century. It included terrorism, intimidation, lynchings, and violent resistance to civil rights by the very authorities that were supposed to be protecting the rights of all.
But this story also has its heroes and its triumphs. It includes black and white abolitionists who stood and spoke out tirelessly on principles of freedom. It includes black families who were forced to build their own schools and community institutions. Blacks built up entrepreneurial enterprises and fortunes, and, sometimes, they rebuilt them after racist terrorism destroyed them. They built their own colleges and universities of the sort that produced key figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. And, finally, after overcoming so many obstacles, they laid claim to the full set of rights that no one can deny them today, taking up their rightful place as first-class citizens.
The U.S. is now a more perfect union than it was. It is still not perfect, but it is a highly functional, dynamic, and successful nation and the most diverse nation in history.
Immigrants from every part of the world aspire to come to the U.S., not because they want to share in ill-gotten wealth from slavery but because people all over the world tacitly understand and acknowledge that no one outdoes Americans in their welcoming attitude toward foreigners and their commitment to fairness and the rule of law.
We hope you will enjoy these essays, beginning with the introduction to the series by Robert Woodson. He holds up the oft-forgotten achievements of blacks even against the grain of Jim Crow as “a powerful refutation of the claim that the destiny of black Americans is determined by what whites do or what they have done in the past.”
We are also proud to host the "1776" essay by Clarence Page, the famed liberal columnist for the Chicago Tribune, whose work has now appeared in print in seven different decades. Page, distressed by “the long-held stereotypes of black people as helpless bystanders in their own history,” urges readers to “desegregate our poverty discussion.” The causes of black and white poverty, he notes, are often strikingly similar.
We have published 10 other essays, as well, which all appear on our "1776" landing page, and we will be adding more as we continue our celebration of Black History Month. Each of the essays at the above link contains valuable arguments, new perspectives, and nuggets of forgotten black history. They are well worth your attention.
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