A history fight. Bob Woodson is spearheading the 1776 project. Black historians are arguing the "true" history of blacks in America. It is a response to the 1619 Project.

"1776" is an assembly of independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery.

To counter the debilitating and dangerous message of the 1619 Project, we are launching “1776,” honoring the vision of our nation’s Founders who saw beyond their years. Though slavery and discrimination are undeniably a tragic part of our nation’s history, we have made great strides along its long and tortuous journey to realize its promise and abide by its founding principles. People are motivated to achieve and to overcome the challenges that confront them when they learn about inspiring victories that are possible, rather than being barraged by constant reminders of injuries they have suffered.

In truth, even during the times of the worst oppression, there were blacks who were in slavery but not of slavery, who maintained a strong moral code and a belief in self-determination and mutual support that allowed them to rise. A surprising number of black men and women who were born slaves died as millionaires. Even in the era of legislated segregation and discrimination, blacks tapped an entrepreneurial legacy to launch thriving enterprises, including hotels, banks, hospitals, dental schools, insurance companies, and a railroad. In fact, the black business district of Durham, North Carolina, was widely known as “Black Wall Street.” 

Another famous black entrepreneurial enclave was the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. When oil was discovered in Tulsa in the early 1900s, the city underwent an enormous growth spurt. Though African Americans were not allowed to create business ventures in the major district and were not even welcomed as customers in the white business district, rather than taking service jobs and doing domestic service labor for others, many adventurous blacks chose to develop their own business district. By 1921, the business enclave had developed into an impressive array of enterprises. 

Tragically, in that year, a young black delivery man was falsely accused of attacking a white woman. Tensions rose and erupted into chaos as a mob of angry whites looted stores, shot at blacks in the streets, and torched businesses, homes, and churches. In this violence, 860 African American businesses and homes were destroyed, and, afterward, the Greenwood business section lay in ruins. Undaunted and displaying the same entrepreneurial spirit that initially built the Greenwood section, blacks joined together in a massive effort of rebuilding. By 1938, business enterprises and community organizations, once again, anchored the community.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-crucial-voice-of-1776

The surprising number of black millionaires was six.

People know of Tulsa's Black Wall Street and its destruction 

If the 1619 Project and the 1776 Project get people reading, it is all to the good.

The latest 1619 Project article was published on 02/12/20. The article focused on 12 sites that were used for slave auctions. These sites have quietly blended into the scenery. Perhaps the buildings should be marked to remind us of the role they played in the past. We have Confederate sites maintained. Reminding us of the selling of human beings that the Confederates supported is also important. 
 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/12/magazine/1619-project-slave-auction-sites.html

The 1619 Project is not a joke The 1619 Project is strong enough to debate the published articles in public. As noted in a post above, a public discussion on the role of slavery in triggering the Revolutionary War will be held in NYC on 03/06/20. Included in the panel will be Gerald Horne who argues that blacks fighting for freedom along side of the indigenous people and the Spanish created a fear of armed blacks in the colonists. In addition, Virginia Governor Lord Dunsmore threatened to arm enslaved men to counter the rebel colonials.
 

https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/history/counter-revolution-1776

Here is editor Nikole Hannah-Jones speaking at UVA

https://www.cbs19news.com/story/41712685/new-york-times-writer-nikole-hannahjones-talks-about-the-1619-project

I guess the laughter is from a guy on Twitter

Some historians, espousing what we might call the establishment view, insist that it is anachronistic to see slavery as central to our understanding of the decades-long revolutionary period. According to this view, the Revolution was in fact fundamentally antislavery, since it led to what Bernard Bailyn called in his 1967 study The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution a “contagion of liberty” that made it possible for Americans to think critically about ending the institution. Such accounts emphasize that various Northern states restricted the slave trade and began to institute gradual emancipation during and after the Revolutionary war, and that enslaved people used the ideals of equality voiced during the Revolution to press their own case for freedom. Although a civil war was fought over what the government could and could not do about slavery, these historians say, Lincoln and other members of the Republican Party envisioned a path to emancipation under the Constitution and made it happen.

According to the establishment view, the Revolution was in fact fundamentally antislavery, since it led to what Bernard Bailyn called a “contagion of liberty” that made it possible for Americans to think about ending the institution.

This is the accepted orthodoxy underwriting the contention, made in the letter sent to the Times, that it is just wrong—as well as bad politics—to tell schoolchildren that some or many or even any American revolutionaries fought to defend their property in slaves from a powerful imperial government. Hannah-Jones wrote that defending slavery was a primary motivation for independence in 1776, but the pushback from Wood and Wilentz was far more absolute. This was not surprising to academics who have followed the work of these historians. Wilentz argues in his latest book, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (2018), that the Constitution was antislavery in its essence and most of its subsequent workings, and has repeatedly gone out of his way to attack those who emphasize the proslavery politics of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. And for his part, Wood, a student of Bailyn, called talk of slavery and the Constitution in Staughton Lynd’s pathbreaking work “anachronistic” in his 1969 book The Creation of the American Republic and has never let up. According to his view, the founders belonged to a “premodern” society and didn’t talk or think about slavery or black people. In response to Silverstein’s response, he wrote, “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”

On the other side of this debate is a growing number of scholars—Woody Holton, Annette Gordon-Reed, Michael McDonnell, Gerald Horne, and myself, among others—who question the establishment view of the Revolution and the founders. These historians, most of them younger than Wood or Wilentz, see a multi-sided struggle in an American Revolution that was about colonizing and winning power and authority. They see slavery as more than a peripheral matter. They do not take for granted that the story is primarily one of uncovering the motives and beliefs of the founders. Their work has considerably undercut the glass-half-full version of the narrative, which sees the end of slavery as a long-term consequence of American idealism and independence.

http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-waldstreicher-hidden-stakes-1619-controversy

On the critic's letter to the NYT

Wilentz reached out to a larger group of historians, but ultimately sent a letter signed by five historians who had publicly criticized the 1619 Project in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site. He told me that the idea of trying to rally a larger group was “misconceived,” citing the holiday season and the end of the semester, among other factors. (A different letter written by Wilentz, calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, quickly amassed hundreds of signatures last week.) The refusal of other historians to sign on, despite their misgivings about some claims made by the 1619 Project, speaks to a divide over whether the letter was focused on correcting specific factual inaccuracies or aimed at discrediting the project more broadly.

and

Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton who was asked to sign the letter, had objected to the 1619 Project’s portrayal of the arrival of African laborers in 1619 as slaves. The 1619 Project was not history “as I would write it,” Painter told me. But she still declined to sign the Wilentz letter.

“I felt that if I signed on to that, I would be signing on to the white guy's attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event,” Painter said. “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it. And I feel like he was asking me to choose sides, and my side is 1619's side, not his side, in a world in which there are only those two sides.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/

Hannah-Jones has a Pulitzer. The academic debate will continue. Wilentz's view of true history will be challenged.