Challenging the narrative pushed in the New York Times’s 1619 Project that America is racist, an activist group led by a conservative civil rights leader is offering an alternative curriculum for schools, churches, and homeschoolers that bolsters the achievements of black people and rejects the victimization heard from liberal African American leaders and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The competing 1776 Unites project instead addresses slavery as “a legacy of excellence and resilience” by African Americans.
“1776, we believe, is not a challenge in the debate with [the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project], but it is an aspirational and an inspirational alternative to this diabolical, I believe, message,” said Robert L. Woodson, head of the Woodson Center. “America should be defined by its promise,” he added.
His center, which promotes solutions to problems in troubled neighborhoods, has started to distribute a K-12 curriculum for free that shows the positive impacts of black people in U.S. history and highlights their successes ignored in most schools and the 1619 Project in an effort to portray blacks as victims of whites.
In announcing the project today, Woodson took aim at the New York Times and black leaders. He said that they have shut off any discussion of black history that challenges the 1619 Project’s theme of racism.
“There is no debate today. There is no black leadership coming together debating the path forward. They have been totally compromised. They are almost a solely owned subsidiary of the radical white left right now,” he said in a Zoom press conference.
“You don’t hear them speaking out against the black businesses that are being burned down in the cities. They are silent about black-on-black violence or Black Lives Matter burning Bibles and also desecrating World War II monuments and taking down Frederick Douglass statues. The black community shouldn’t be silent about all of this. And so, we think 1776 is stepping into that void to give some semblance of direction to the rebuilding and reuniting of the country. We want to reunite people,” he added.
Woodson Center fellow Ian Rowe said the project’s curriculum studies the past and offers solutions to racism and other issues in the future.
Both said that the project was sparked by the 1619 Project.
Woodson said that it was “a very corrosive and very dangerous challenge to the traditional values. In essence, what they’re saying is because of 1619, a time when slaves arrived on these shores, that America should be defined as a racist society where all whites are culpable and guilty of having privilege, and therefore should be punished, and all blacks are victims that should be compensated.”
