Has your woke child outgrown Ibram X. Kendi’s Anti-Racist Baby? Are you looking for more social justice propaganda to cram into their little skull full of mush? You are in luck – Pulitzer Prize-winning race-baiter Nikole Hannah-Jones is coming out with a 1619 Project children’s book just in time for the holiday season!
That’s right! On Sunday morning, the creator of The New York Times’ discredited 1619 Project announced her new children’s book, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, is now available for pre-order ahead of its November 16 release.
Can’t wait for the #1619project children’s book “Born on the Water” to live in the world. It’s the book I wish I’d had as a young girl, & a story for every child. In awe of my co-writer @harlemportland & the absolutely breathtaking illustrations by @nikkolas_smith. Pre-order now. pic.twitter.com/IYYJEuARI7
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) August 22, 2021
In the tweet, the newly minted Howard University professor attached screenshots of the Barnes and Noble page’s “Notes From Your Bookseller” which called the tome “a powerful exploration of the origins of American identity and the lingering impact it’s had on society.” It went on to gush, “We haven’t seen a project like this before and it’s[sic] unlikely to see one in the future.” There’s a good reason we haven’t seen anything like this before and let’s HOPE we don’t see any more in the future!
The book’s description said: “The 1619 Project’s lyrical picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the United States.”
There's nothing wrong with having a children’s book that honors the black community overcoming the horrors of slavery and triumphing over the terrors of Jim Crow, but basing it off the blatant falsehoods of race essentialists like Hannah-Jones is not the way to do it.
One of the preview images on the Amazon book page showed a page on Anthony and Isabella Tucker and their son William. It claimed they were “enslaved,” “forced to till the soil, forced to build a country,” and “were not free.” But, according to the website Black Past, the Tuckers (and other Africans who arrived in 1619) were not slaves, but indentured servants:
According to the 1624-1625 Virginia Census, 22 Africans lived in Virginia at the time of [William] Tucker’s birth. The first 20 of these Africans arrived in 1619 and all of them worked under indentured servitude contracts. These men and women were not slaves because Virginia’s General Assembly had not yet worked out the terms for enslavement in the colony. Consequently these first Africans in Virginia received the same rights, duties, privileges, responsibilities, and punishments as their white indentured counterparts from Great Britain. They also worked under the same terms and many but not all were given land at the end of their period of indenture. In fact they and their descendants became the nucleus of the free black population which existed in Virginia prior to the Civil War.
This is not the only historical source to confirm the first Africans who arrived in 1619 were treated as indentured servants. That kind of blows up the entire “1619” thesis.
There are SO many problems with Hannah-Jones using the year 1619 as America’s “true founding” and “the beginning of American slavery.” The former claim The New York Times infamously stealth edited out, the latter ignores African slavery in the Spanish colonies that are now part of the U.S. and how the indentured servitude of all races in the early 1600s differed from the later hereditary chattel slavery for Africans and blacks.
Of course, these were not the only factual problems with her 1619 Project.
Five preeminent historians wrote a letter to The New York Times in 2019 that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project” to the point that the mistakes “suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Another historian said she told The Times about errors pre-publication but they ignored her. Even the World Socialist Web Site railed against the project in a lengthy article calling it “a racialist falsification of American and world history.”
After all that it still took several months for The Times to finally issue a small correction to Hannah-Jones’ erroneous claim that “slavery was a primary motivation of colonists in revolting against England.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones is neither a journalist nor historian, she is an activist in every sense of the word. But there she goes with a new kids’ book, profiting off her own lies, and poisoning young minds in the process.
