Debunking the 1619 Project by Mary Grabar

Author:Mary Grabar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery History
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

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“In the controversy that ensued over Jefferson’s candidacy for the presidency a few years later,” Bedini comments, “he was attacked simultaneously from both sides, by those who foresaw in the liberation of Negro slaves a danger to the entire property system in the Southern states, and by those who supported the abolition of slavery.” Banneker, as a result of the actions of his well-intentioned friends, became “the symbol of the oppressed Negro.”80

Little could Jefferson, Banneker, Banneker’s abolitionist friends—or anyone before 2019—have imagined, however, the use to which this event would be put in The 1619 Project.

The spot reserved for Banneker is in a “broadsheet,” a special section in the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times, co-produced with the Smithsonian Museum of African American History (ironic, given Banneker’s biographer’s affiliation with the once venerable Smithsonian). This section, marked off by a cover featuring a “broadside” announcement for a slave auction, also features photographs of slave artifacts.

There is a column titled “A Powerful Letter” in this broadsheet, about 250 words long and illustrated with a crude Edvard Munch–style drawing of a seemingly beleaguered Banneker in the foreground, with a smaller Jefferson hovering behind his shoulder. The tribute is to Banneker, but it is hardly flattering to Banneker, and certainly not to Jefferson. About half of the short column is dedicated to repeating the case against Jefferson as a “lifelong enslaver,” presenting his condemnation of King George for the slave trade as the clever ruse of a hypocrite, stating, “This language was excised from the final document” along with “all references to slavery” in a “stunning contrast to the document’s opening statement about the equality of men.” The equality clause is not, in fact, “the document’s opening statement”; it is in the second paragraph of the Declaration. But historical accuracy gets swept aside in the rush to point out that “Jefferson was a lifelong enslaver. He inherited enslaved black people; he fathered enslaved black children; and he relied on enslaved black people for his livelihood and comfort.” And Jefferson “openly speculated that black people were inferior to white people and continually advocated for their removal from the country.”81

Banneker is described as “a free black mathematician, scientist, astronomer and surveyor” who wrote Jefferson arguing against this “mind-set,” “urging him to correct his ‘narrow prejudices’ and to ‘eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us.’ ” And it continues: “Banneker also condemned Jefferson’s slaveholding in his letter and included a manuscript of his almanac.… Jefferson was unconvinced of the intelligence of African-Americans, and in his swift reply only noted that he welcomed ‘such proofs as you exhibit’ of black people with ‘talents equal to those of the other colors of men.’ ”82

This completely falsifies both sides of the exchange. Banneker’s actual letter, which runs to fourteen paragraphs, says nothing about “Jefferson’s slaveholding”—in fact it contains no personal criticism at all of the author of the Declaration. The 1619 Project misrepresents Banneker as an embittered man lashing out at Jefferson—the very opposite of the respectful tone of his letter.

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