The 1619 Project: The Debate Continues

In other words, how far back into the past one goes in order to establish the beginnings of one’s own tradition or cultural idiom is not only relative but even at best is also, on close inspection, very likely to be downright arbitrary . . .

—Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans

Once, when visiting Albert Murray in his book-lined living room at the Harlem Lenox Terrace apartment he and his family lived for 50+ years, I asked him what he thought of black intellectuals.

“Black intellectuals?” he asked with a heap of exasperation. “They haven’t even digested the first fifteen pages of The Omni-Americans.”

Now, a quarter century since he said those words—and over fifty years from the publication of his first book—this sorry reality still rings true. Case in point: journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and others involved in The 1619 Project.

This New  York Times project began as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine in 2019, was published as a long-form book in 2021, and is currently a documentary series on Hulu. The basic premise of the 1619 Project is that the founding of the United States should be 1619, the year the first twenty enslaved Africans landed in Jamestown, Virginia. Why? Anti-black racism and the ideology of white supremacy is in the very DNA of the United States, according to Hannah-Jones, and the impact of this nefarious history continues to this day. She also argues that despite this legacy of oppression, Black Americans have been patriotic, displaying fealty, time and time again, to American ideals.

In the first fifteen pages of The Omni-Americans, Murray provides a framework that places 1619 as a significant year, but not to supplant 1776 as the founding of the nation via the Declaration of Independence. Since Murray isn’t mentioned even once in the 600+ page volume of essays and poetry released two years ago, it’s not surprising that the characteristic nuance that Murray renders is absent from The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

The first section of The Omni-Americans is titled “A Natural History: E Pluribus Unum.” Here, Murray discusses the nature of historical origins and what’s at stake.

. . . there are some (many of whom are makers of school books) who mark the beginnings of the American tradition from the time of the landings of the first Europeans in the Western Hemisphere, if not from the birth of Christopher Columbus (who never even saw the mainland). There are others for whom the settling of Virginia marked the official as well as the mythological birth of the nation. For still others it is as if nothing of significance happened before the landing of the Mayflower. And other “original beginnings” have been located in the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. So it goes depending upon the orientation of the historian.

 —Albert Murray

What Murray above calls the “orientation” of those who choose a particular event as the marker for origins is usually based on “. . . some specific functional combination of desirable skills and attitudes in terms of which one wishes to project oneself.”

By this standard, we can ask: What are the functional combination of desirable skills and attitudes that the creators of the 1619 Project are attempting to inculcate and project?

The attitude of skepticism toward triumphant narratives of American exceptionalism is one; the postmodern skill of critical assessment of the faults and hypocrisy of modernity and the Enlightenment is another. Another is an attitude of recognition of the actual achievements of Black Americans in spite of domination, and the skill of connecting current social and economic problems to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow is yet another.

As quiet as its kept, the recognition of the dedication and fortitude of Black Americans throughout American history is where the 1619 Project, Albert Murray’s work, and the counter-narrative of the 1776 Unites movement, launched by Robert Woodson in response to the 1619 Project, meet.

The differences among these perspectives, aside from left vs. right ideological tribalism, regards narrative intent and emphasis. No one with any sense denies the horror and evil of enslavement and the segregation era. The question becomes how do we assess the past in allegiance to truth, and what narratives will move us forward? Murray, for one, didn’t shy away from the historical reality of the ideology of white supremacy; indeed, the original subtitle of The Omni-Americans was “Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy.” However, Murray, like Frederick Douglass after breaking from the influence of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, focused on the principles and aspirational power of the nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Frame of Rejection vs Frame of Acceptance

The 1619 Project is what Murray called a “frame of rejection” narrative, a protest against the unfairness and injustices of life and history. Murray, on the other hand, transcended that approach through a “frame of acceptance” narrative, which includes a critique of injustice while also accepting the necessity for heroic action against it, all the while realizing the mature truth that human life is and will remain tragic and unfair.

A narrative frame which rejects wrongs doesn’t necessarily point to how individuals and groups can take action to correct those wrongs, without making situations and predicaments worse. Murray’s frame of acceptance narrative integrated not only the contributions of Black Americans but also other groups in the creation of what cultural historian Constance Rourke called the American national character.

Rather than downplaying the essential role of descendants of Europe, such as Yankees, in the formation of the nation’s character, or ignoring the role of Native Americans, Murray agreed with Rourke that these three archetypal figures comprised a composite. Of the Negro American component of that synthesis, Rourke wrote: Their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations provided emblems for a pioneer people who required resilience as a prime trait.

And what was Murray’s perspective on the year 1619?

Thus, though recognizing that the depths, which after all are bottomless, have not actually been plumbed, there is no truly urgent reason to trace the origin of U.S. Negro style and manner any farther back in time than the arrival of a Dutch ship of war in Virginia with a cargo of twenty black captives for sale in 1619 —if indeed that far.

1619 was the year that a new people—African descendants in North America—in the New World began their tragi-comic sojourn. What became the United States of America was still in formation, with indentured servitude preceding what became a brutal system of chattel slavery and racism.

This is the underside of the American experience that Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project emphasize. But this partial view can become more complete by including a cultural narrative of plural contributions to what America is and has become, a storyline and narrative vision that honors American aspiration while still striving and striding toward freedom.