Sen. Tom Cotton is proposing to bar federal funds from being used in public schools to teach a curriculum on United States history that is based on the New York Times feature focused on race as a defining feature of the nation’s story.
The feature, known as The 1619 Project, is a series of investigative and commentary articles commissioned by the New York Times that focuses on slavery and race relations in the U.S., beginning before the nation’s founding and claiming to offer a truer accounting of its history.
Cotton, an Arkansas Republican mulling a 2024 presidential bid, unveiled the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from financing the teaching of The 1619 Project in K-12 schools.
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded,” Cotton said in a statement. “Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.”
The legislation would mandate the federal departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services to “prorate” federal education funds to school districts that decide to include The 1619 Project in their curriculum. Schools that taught the program also would lose out on “federal professional-development grants.”
Some school districts are moving to incorporate The 1619 Project into their history programs, despite the accuracy of this series of articles being called into question by some historians. However, Cotton’s bill would be dead on arrival in the Democratic House — if it passed the Republican Senate, which also appears unlikely.
This is not Cotton’s first run-in with the New York Times. In June, Cotton published an op-ed with the newspaper in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. The piece proved so controversial with New York Times journalists that a lengthy apology note was attached to the op-ed and a top opinion section editor was forced to resign.
Conservatives and others have said that Cotton’s views were mainstream and should not have caused controversy.
