Pulitzer Prize Administrator Dana Canedy defended the committee’s decision to award the New York Times the top honor in commentary for its 1619 Project.
The 1619 Project aimed to reexamine the legacy of slavery in the United States and was timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia. Critics of the project, including some historians, have argued that the series is based on a flawed premise that American colonists revolted from England to maintain slavery in America.
Canedy told the Washington Times on Tuesday that the board was “very proud of this selection,” adding that its “fresh political perspective, provocativeness of the argument, and engaging writing is what we are awarded.”
“The piece provoked useful public debate and conversation about an important matter — the very identity of our nation. This is what we want commentary to do,” she said.
In the series’s opening essay, award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about how Africans who came to the colonies in bondage have shaped the idea of traditional American values. Despite the premise of the project, an editor’s note was attached to Hannah-Jones’s piece explaining, “A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them.”
Canedy also argued that it isn’t “settled ‘fact'” that slavery was not a primary cause for the Revolutionary War.
“Although many historians, perhaps most historians, believe that the preservation of slavery was not among the primary causes of the Revolutionary War, we do not regard this as a matter of settled ‘fact,’ but something still subject to scholarly debate and contestation,” Canedy wrote. “This piece is also about so much more than the revolutionary war. [It’s] about slavery and its consequences for the very character of the nation.”
There was outcry from critics after the New York Times was awarded the Pulitzer.
