The New York Times Begins Correcting the Historical Record on "1619 Project"

By Jonathan Butcher of The Heritage Foundation.

"Key Takeaways

On March 11, the Times issued a correction to its 1619 Project, a sprawling journalistic exercise that has proved more editorial than historical. 

The 1619 Project wanted no confusion: American history began with slavery.

Unfortunately, the Times’ correction may be too little, too late for thousands of students. 

“I have been thinking about this and reading obsessively for 25 years about all the inequalities in American life that can be traced back to slavery,” Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times told an audience at Harvard in December.

Now the Times admits: Her obsession bested her reason.

On March 11, the Times issued a correction to its 1619 Project, a sprawling journalistic exercise that has proved more editorial than historical.

And this wasn’t just any correction. The 1619 Project was based on the idea that slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution,” but the Times is now hedging on that assertion.

In the paper’s correction, editors changed the wording of Hannah-Jones’ leading article in the series to say that “some of” the colonists fought the American Revolution to defend slavery.

The editors called this a “small” clarification, and it was indeed very small, although considering that the 1619 Project’s full-throated commitment to demonstrating that American history can only be explained through the lens of slavery, this correction appears nothing short of essential.

But the correction did not go far enough.

Writing in National Review, Timothy Sandefur explained, “The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’ purports to ‘reframe’ American history by positing not only that the United States was founded ‘as a slavocracy,’ but that ‘nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional’ is the result of ‘slavery—and the anti-black racism it required.’”

The 1619 Project wanted no confusion: American history began with slavery.

Yet historians from both sides of the ideological divide and even one of the Times’ own fact-checkers cited problems with the Project. On March 6, Leslie M. Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University, wrote in Politico that she had “vigorously argued against” Hannah-Jones’ contention that “patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

“Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway,” Harris wrote, even as she maintained her support for the project as a whole.

Sandefur and Harris aren’t alone in their critiques. The Wall Street Journal cited criticism from Pulitzer-winning historians Gordon Wood and James McPherson, with Wood saying, “It still strikes me as amazing why the New York Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.”"