Page 30 - 1619 Project Curriculum

The 1619 Project

Ieshia Evans being detained by law enforcement officers at a Black Lives Matter protest in

2016 outside the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department.
dismembered with their body parts race — did not simply disappear newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier by the 14th Amendment; and the

displayed in storefronts. This vio- once slavery ended. If the former- wrote, ‘‘We wage a two-pronged right to vote, which was guaranteed

lence was meant to terrify and con- ly enslaved and their descendants attack against our enslavers at home in 1870 by the 15th Amendment. In

trol black people, but perhaps just as became educated, if we thrived in and those abroad who will enslave response to black demands for these

important, it served as a psycholog- the jobs white people did, if we us.’’ Woodard’s blinding is largely rights, white Americans strung them

ical balm for white supremacy: You excelled in the sciences and arts, seen as one of the catalysts for the from trees, beat them and dumped

would not treat human beings this then the entire justification for how decades- long rebellion we have their bodies in muddy rivers, assas-

way. The extremity of the violence this nation allowed slavery would come to call the civil rights move- sinated them in their front yards,

was a symptom of the psychologi- collapse. Free black people posed a ment. But it is useful to pause and firebombed them on buses, mauled

cal mechanism necessary to absolve danger to the country’s idea of itself remember that this was the second them with dogs, peeled back their

white Americans of their country’s as exceptional; we held up the mir- mass movement for black civil rights, skin with fire hoses and murdered

original sin. To answer the ques- ror which the nation preferred the first being Reconstruction. As the their children with explosives set off
in

tion of how they could prize liberty not to peer. And so the inhumanity centennial of slavery’s end neared, inside a church.

abroad while simultaneously deny- visited on black people by every black people were still seeking the For the most part, black Amer- Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

ing liberty to an entire race back generation of white America justi- rights they had fought for and won icans fought back alone. Yet we

home, white Americans resorted to fied the inhumanity of the past. after the Civil War: the right to be never fought only for ourselves.

the same racist ideology that Jeffer- Just as white Americans feared, treated equally by public institutions, The bloody freedom struggles of

son and the framers had used at the World War II ignited what became which was guaranteed in 1866 with the civil rights movement laid the

nation’s founding. black Americans’ second sustained the Civil Rights Act; the right to be foundation for every other mod- Photograph by

This ideology — that black people eff ort to make democracy real. As treated as full citizens before the ern rights struggle. This nation’s

belonged to an inferior, subhuman the editorial board of the black law, which was guaranteed in 1868 white founders set up a decidedly

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