The New York Times' 1619 Project A Racialist Falsification of American and World History

THE NEW YORK TIMES’
1619 PROJECT
A racialist
falsification of
American and
world history
NILES NIEMUTH S TOM MACKAMAN
DAVID NORTH
8
A WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE PAMPHLET
The New York Times’ 1619 Project:
A racialist falsification of
American and world history
Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, David North
World Socialist Web Site Pamphlet

©2019 World Socialist Web Site
www.wsws.org
Published by World Socialist Web Site

P.O. Box 48377
Oak Park, MI 48237
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of
American and world history��7
Book review:
Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South�� 23
Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections?��35
The attacks on Green Book and the racialist

infection of the affluent middle class��39
5
Editor’s note:
“The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world
history” was published in the World Socialist Web Site in two parts on September 3
and 4, 2019.
Additional articles from the World Socialist Website addressing the theme of racial
politics are also included.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project:
A racialist falsification of
American and world history
By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North
“The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of
its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history entirely
through the prism of race and racial conflict. The occasion for this publication is the
400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Port Comfort in Virginia,
a British colony in North America. On the very next day, the slaves were traded for food.
The Project, according to the Times, intends to “reframe the country’s history,
understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and
the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves
about who we are.”
Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619
Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical
narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral
coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual pref-
erence, ethnicity, and, above all, race.
The Times is promoting the Project with an unprecedented and lavishly financed
publicity blitz. It is working with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has
developed a proposed teaching curriculum that will be sent to schools for teachers to
use in their classes. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine and a special
supplement have been printed for free distribution at schools, libraries and museums
across the country. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the staff writer and New America Foundation
fellow who first pitched the idea for the Project, oversaw its production and authored
the introduction, will be sent on a national lecture tour of schools.
7
8 The New York Times’ 1619 Project
The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that
all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred
of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction:
“Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains
the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and
development. The transfer of this critical biological term to the study of a country—
even if meant only in a metaphorical sense—leads to bad history and reactionary
politics. Countries do not have DNA, they have historically formed economic structures,
antagonistic classes and complex political relationships. These do not exist apart from
a certain level of technological development, nor independently of a more or less
developed network of global economic interconnections.
The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social
being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental
sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of
a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analyzed not as a specific
economically rooted form of the exploitation of labor, but, rather, as the manifesta-
tion of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims
Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist
independently of any change in political or economic conditions.
Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antag-
onisms from innate biological processes. Democratic Party politician Stacey Abrams, in
A racialist falsification of American and world history 9
an essay published recently in Foreign Affairs,
claims that whites and African Americans are
separated by an “intrinsic difference.”
This irrational and scientifically absurd
claim serves to legitimize the reactionary
view—entirely compatible with the politi-
cal perspective of fascism—that blacks and
whites are hostile and incompatible species.
In yet another article, published in the
current edition of Foreign Affairs, the neurol-
ogist Robert Sapolsky argues that the antag-
onism between human groups is rooted in
biology. Extrapolating from bloody territorial
conflicts between chimpanzees, with whom
Nikole Hannah-Jones humans “share more than 98 percent of their
DNA,” Sapolsky asserts that understanding
“the dynamics of human group identity, including the resurgence of nationalism—that
potentially most destructive form of in-group bias—requires grasping the biological and
cognitive underpinnings that shape them.”
Sapolsky’s simplistic dissolution of history into biology recalls not only the
reactionary invocation of “Social Darwinism” to legitimize imperialist conquest by
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialists, but also the efforts of
German geneticists to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for Nazi anti-Semitism
and racism.
Dangerous and reactionary ideas are wafting about in bourgeois academic and
political circles. No doubt, the authors of the Project 1619 essays would deny that they
are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors
bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and
misguided arguments.
American slavery is a monumental subject with vast and enduring historical and
political significance. The events of 1619 are part of that history. But what occurred at
Port Comfort is one episode in the global history of slavery, which extends back into the
ancient world, and of the origins and development of the world capitalist system. There
is a vast body of literature dealing with the widespread practice of slavery outside the
Americas. As Professor G. Ogo Nwokeji of the Department of African American Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley, has explained, slavery was practiced by African
societies. It existed in West Africa “well before the fifteenth century, when the Europeans
arrived there via the Atlantic Ocean.”1
1. The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 3, AD 1420-AD1804, edited by David Eltis and Stanley
L. Engerman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 81.
The Cotton Pickers, 1864, by Winslow Homer
Historian Rudolph T. Ware III of the University of Michigan writes, “Between the
beginning of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, millions lived and died as
slaves in African Muslim societies.”2 Among the most important of contemporary scholarly
works on the subject is Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, orig-
inally published in 1983, by the Canadian historian Paul E. Lovejoy. He explained:
Slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been

found in many places, from classical antiquity to very recent times. Africa
has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of
slaves for ancient civilizations, the Islamic world, India, and the Americas,
and as one of the principal areas where slavery was common. Indeed, in
Africa slavery lasted well into the twentieth century—notably longer than
in the Americas. Such antiquity and persistence requires explanation, both
to understand the historical development of slavery in Africa in its own right
and to evaluate the relative importance of the slave trade to this development.
Broadly speaking, slavery expanded in at least three stages—1350 to 1600,
1600 to 1800, and 1800 to 1900—by which time slavery had become a fun-
damental feature of the African political economy.3
2. Ibid, p. 47.
3. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery Third ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), p. 1.
Professor Lovejoy remarked in the preface to the Third Edition of his now-classic
study that one of his aims in undertaking his research “was to confront the reality that
there was slavery in the history of Africa, at a time when some romantic visionaries
and hopeful nationalists wanted to deny the clear facts.”4
In relation to the New World, the phenomenon of slavery in modern history cannot
be understood apart from its role in the economic development of capitalism in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Karl Marx explained in the chapter titled “The
Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” in Volume One of Das Kapital :
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement

and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the
era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta
of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the
European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the
Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin
War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.5
Marx’s analysis inspired the critical insight of the brilliant West Indian historian
Eric Williams, who wrote in his pioneering study Capitalism and Slavery, published
in 1944:
Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A
racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenom-
enon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of
slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow;
Catholic, Protestant and pagan.6
The formation and development of the United States cannot be understood apart
from the international economic and political processes that gave rise to capitalism
and the New World. Slavery was an international economic institution that stretched
from the heart of Africa to the shipyards of Britain, the banking houses of Amsterdam,
and the plantations of South Carolina, Brazil and the Caribbean. Every colonial power
was involved, from the Dutch who operated slave trading posts in West Africa, to the
Portuguese who imported millions of slaves to Brazil. An estimated 15 to 20 million
4. Ibid., p. xxiii.
5. Karl Marx, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Capital, Vol. 1, Collected Works, Vol. 35 (Lon-
don: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010 [digital edition]), p.739.
6. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 7.
Africans were forcibly sent to the Americas throughout the entire period of the trans-At-
lantic slave trade. Of these, 400,000 ended up in the 13 British colonies/United States.
Slavery was the inescapable and politically tragic legacy of the global foundation
of the United States. It is not difficult to recognize the contradiction between the ideals
proclaimed by the leaders of the American Revolution—which were expressed with
extraordinary force by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—and the
existence of slavery in the newly formed United States.
But history is not a morality tale. The efforts to discredit the Revolution by focusing
on the alleged hypocrisy of Jefferson and other founders contribute nothing to an
understanding of history. The American Revolution cannot be understood as the sum
of the subjective intentions and moral limitations of those who led it. The world-his-
torical significance of the Revolution is best understood through an examination of
its objective causes and consequences.
The analysis provided by Williams refutes the scurrilous attempt by the 1619
Project to portray the Revolution as a sinister attempt to uphold the slave system.
Apart from the massive political impact of Jefferson’s Declaration and the subsequent
overthrow of British rule, Williams stressed the objective impact of the Revolution on
the economic viability of slavery. He wrote:
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. …”
Jefferson wrote only part of the truth. It was economic, not political, bands
that were being dissolved. A new age had begun. The year 1776 marked the
Declaration of Independence and the publication of the Wealth of Nations.
Far from accentuating the value of the sugar islands [in the Caribbean],
American independence marked the beginning of their uninterrupted decline,
and it was a current saying at the time that the British ministry had lost not
only thirteen colonies but eight islands as well.
It was not an accident that the victorious conclusion of the revolutionary war
in 1783 was followed just four years later by the famous call of English abolitionist
William Wilberforce for the ending of Britain’s slave trade.
In examining the emergence of British opposition to the slave trade, Williams
made a fundamental point about the study of history that serves as an indictment
of the subjective and anti-historical method employed by the 1619 Project. He wrote:
The decisive forces in the period of history we have discussed are the devel-
oping economic forces.
These economic changes are gradual, imperceptible, but they have an

irresistible cumulative effect. Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware
of the ultimate results of
their activity. The commercial
capitalism of the eighteenth
century developed the wealth
of Europe by means of slav-
ery and monopoly. But in so
doing it helped to create the
industrial capitalism of the
nineteenth century, which
turned round and destroyed
the power of commercial
capitalism, slavery, and all
its works. Without a grasp
of these economic changes
the history of the period is
meaningless.7
The victory of the American

Revolution and the establishment
of the United States did not solve
Scars of a whipped slave (April 2, 1863, Baton Rouge,
the problem of slavery. The eco- Louisiana)
nomic and political conditions
for its abolition had not sufficiently matured. But the economic development of
the United States—the simultaneous development of industry in the North and the
noxious growth of the cotton-based plantation system in the South (as a consequence
of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793)—intensified the contradictions between
two increasingly incompatible economic systems—one based on wage labor and
the other on slavery.
The United States heaved from crisis to crisis in the seven decades that separated
the adoption of the Constitution and the election of President George Washington in
1789 from Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.
None of the repeated compromises which sought to balance the country between slave
and free states, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in
1854, were ever able to finally settle the issue.
It is worth bearing in mind that the 87 years of history invoked by Lincoln when
he spoke at Gettysburg in 1863 is the same span of time that separates our present day
from the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. The explosive socio-economic
tendencies which would do away with the entire economic system of slavery developed
and erupted in this relatively concentrated period of time.
7. Ibid., p. 210.
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, Francis Bicknell Carpenter,
1864
The founding of the United States set into motion a crisis which resulted in the
Civil War, the second American Revolution, in which hundreds of thousands of whites
gave their lives to finally put an end to slavery. It must be stressed that this was not an
accidental, let alone unconscious, outcome of the Civil War. In the end, the war resulted
in the greatest expropriation of private property in world history, not equaled until the
Russian Revolution in 1917, when the working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, took
state power for the first and so far, only time in world history.
Hannah-Jones does not view Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator,” as the freed slaves
called him in the 1860s, but as a garden-variety racist who held “black people [as] the
obstacle to national unity.” The author simply disregards Lincoln’s own words—for
example, the Gettysburg Address and the magisterial Second Inaugural Address—as
well as the books written by historians such as Eric Foner, James McPherson, Allen
Guelzo, David Donald, Ronald C. White, Stephen Oates, Richard Carwardine and many
others that demonstrate Lincoln’s emergence as a revolutionary leader fully committed
to the destruction of slavery.
But an honest portrayal of Lincoln would contradict Hannah-Jones’ claims that
“black Americans fought back alone” to “make America a democracy.” So too would a
single solitary mention, anywhere in the magazine, of the 2.2 million Union soldiers
who fought and the 365,000 who died to end slavery.
Likewise, the interracial character of the abolitionist movement is blotted out. The
names William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown, Thad-
deus Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, do not appear in her essay.
A couple of abolitionists are selectively quoted for their criticism of the Constitution,
Pullman Company workers walking off the job in 1894 (Credit: Hoosier State Chronicles)
but Hannah-Jones dares not mention that for the antislavery movement Jefferson’s
Declaration of Independence was, in the words of the late historian David Brion Davis,
their “touchstone, the sacred scripture.”
Hannah-Jones and the other 1619 Project contributors—claiming that slavery was
the unique “original sin” of the United States, and discrediting the American Revolution
and the Civil War as elaborate conspiracies to perpetuate white racism—have little to
add to the rest of American history. Nothing ever changed. Slavery was simply replaced
by Jim Crow segregation, and this in turn has given way to the permanent condition
of racism that is the inescapable fate of being a “white American.” It all goes back to
1619 and “the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation
to this day.”8 [emphasis added]
This is not simply a “reframing” of history. It is an attack and falsification that
ignores more than a half-century of scholarship. There is not the slightest indication
that Hannah-Jones (or any of her co-essayists) have even heard of, let alone read, the
work on slavery carried out by Williams, Davis, or Peter Kolchin; on the American
Revolution by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood; on the political conceptions that
8. The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 19.

Three coal miners of the Lorain Coal Dock Company in Lorado, West Virginia in 1918
motivated union soldiers by James McPherson; on Reconstruction by Eric Foner; on

Jim Crow segregation by C. Vann Woodward; or on the Great Migration by James N.
Gregory or Joe William Trotter.
What is left out of the Times’ racialist morality tale is breathtaking, even from the
vantage point of African-American scholarship. The invocation of white racism takes
the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political and social history
of the country.
There is no examination of the historical context, foremost the development of the
class struggle, within which the struggle of the African-American population developed
in the century that followed the Civil War. And there is no reference to the transforma-
tion of the United States into an industrial colossus and the most powerful imperialist
country between 1865 and 1917, the year of its entry into World War I.
While the 1619 Project and its stable of well-to-do authors find in the labor
exploitation of slavery a talisman to explain all of history, they pass over in deafening
silence the exploitation inherent in wage labor.
A reader of the 1619 Project would not know that the struggle against slave labor
gave way to a violent struggle against wage slavery, in which countless workers were
killed. There is no reference to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 which spread like
wildfire along the railways from Baltimore to St. Louis and was only suppressed by the
deployment of federal troops, nor to the emergence of the Knights of Labor, the fight for
the eight-hour day and the Haymarket Massacre, the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892,
the Pullman strike of 1894, the formation of the AFL, the founding of the Socialist Party,
the emergence of the IWW, the Ludlow Massacre, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the
countless other labor struggles that followed World War I, and finally the emergence
of the CIO and the massive industrial struggles of the 1930s.
In short, there is no class struggle and, therefore, there is no real history of the
African-American population and the events which shaped a population of freed slaves
into a critical section of the working class. Replacing real history with a mythic racial
narrative, the 1619 Project ignores the actual social development of the African-Amer-
ican population over the last 150 years.
Nowhere do any of the authors discuss the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970
in which millions of blacks, and whites, uprooted from the rural South and flocked to
take jobs in urban areas across the US, particularly in the industrialized North. James P.
Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, captured the revolutionary implications
of this process, for both African-American and white workers, in his inimitable prose:
American capitalism took hundreds of thousands of Negroes from the South,

and exploiting their ignorance, and their poverty, and their fears, and their
individual helplessness, herded them into the steel mills as strikebreakers
in the steel strike of 1919. And in the brief space of one generation, by its
mistreatment, abuse and exploitation of these innocent and ignorant Negro
strikebreakers, this same capitalism succeeded in transforming them and
their sons into one of the most militant and reliable detachments of the great
victorious steel strike of 1946.
This same capitalism took tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of

prejudiced hillbillies from the South, many of them members and sympa-
thizers of the Ku Klux Klan; and thinking to use them, with their ignorance
and their prejudices, as a barrier against unionism, sucked them into the
auto and rubber factories of Detroit, Akron and other industrial centers.
There it sweated them, humiliated them and drove and exploited them until
it finally changed them and made new men out of them. In that harsh school
the imported southerners learned to exchange the insignia of the KKK for the
union button of the CIO, and to turn the Klansman’s fiery cross into a bonfire
to warm pickets at the factory gate.9
As late as 1910, nearly 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the former slave

states, overwhelmingly in conditions of rural isolation. By the 1970s, they were highly
urbanized and proletarianized. Black workers had gone through the experiences of the
great industrial strikes, alongside whites, in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago.
It is no historical accident that the civil rights movement emerged in the South in
Birmingham, Alabama, a center of the steel industry and the locus of the actions of
communist workers, black and white.
9. James P. Cannon, “The Coming American Revolution,” Speech delivered at the Twelfth National
Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, 1946.
The struggle of wage labor against
capital at the point of production united
workers across racial boundaries. And
so, in the fevered rhetoric of the Jim
Crow politician, the civil rights move-
ment was equated with communism and
the fear of “race-mixing”—that is, that
the working masses, black and white,
might be united around their common
interests.
Just as it leaves out the history of
the working class, the 1619 Project
fails to provide political history. There
is no accounting of the role played by
the Democratic Party, an alliance of
Northern industrialists and machine
politicians, on one side, and the Southern
slavocracy and then Jim Crow politicians,
Martin Luther King, Jr. holding up a photo of in consciously pitting white and black
Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman at a press con-
frence on December 6, 1964
workers against each other by stoking
up race hatred.
In the numerous articles which make up the 1619 Project, the name of Martin
Luther King, Jr. appears just once, and then only in a photo caption. The reason for
this is that King’s political outlook was opposed to the racialist narrative advanced by
the Times. King did not condemn the American Revolution and the Civil War. He did
not believe that racism was a permanent characteristic of “whiteness.” He called for
the integration of blacks and whites and set as his goal the ultimate dissolution of race
itself. Targeted and harassed as a “communist” by the FBI, King was murdered after
launching the interracial Poor People’s Campaign and announcing his opposition to
the Vietnam War.
King encouraged the involvement of white civil rights activists, several of whom
lost their lives in the South, including Viola Liuzzo, the wife of a Teamsters union
organizer from Detroit. His statement following the murders of the three young civil
rights workers in 1964, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (two
of whom were white) was an impassioned condemnation of racism and segregation.
King clearly does not fit into Hannah-Jones’ narrative.
But, in its most significant and telling omission, the 1619 Project says nothing
about the event that had the greatest impact on the social condition of African-Amer-
icans—the Russian Revolution of 1917. Not only did this arouse and inspire broad
sections of the African-American population—including countless black intellectuals,
writers, and artists, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes,
Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry—the Revolution
undermined the political foundations of American racial apartheid.
Given the 1619 Project’s black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising
that nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike
the black nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American impe-
rialism. She boasts that “we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial
groups to serve in the United States military,” and celebrates the fact that “we” have
fought “in every war this nation has waged.” Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a
manner that is at all critical. She does not condemn the creation of a “volunteer” army
whose recruiters prey on poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that
Hannah-Jones opposes the “War on Terror” and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya,
Yemen, Somalia and Syria—all supported by the Times—that have killed and made
homeless upwards of 20 million people. On this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably
“color-blind.” She is unaware of, or simply indifferent to, the millions of “people of
color” butchered and made refugees by the American war machine in the Middle East,
Central Asia and Africa.
The toxic identity
politics that underlies
this indifference does
not serve the interests of
the working class in the
United States or anywhere
else, which is dependent
for its very survival on
unifying across racial
and national boundaries.
It does, however, serve
the class interests of
privileged sections of the
American upper-middle
class.
In a revealing pas-
sage at the end of her
essay, Hannah-Jones
declares that since the
1960s “black Americans
have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.”
She is speaking here not for her “race” but a tiny layer of the African-American elite,
beneficiaries of affirmative action policies, who came to political maturity in the
years leading up to and through the administration of Barack Obama, the United
States’ first black president.
A 2017 analysis of economic data found extreme levels of wealth inequality within
racial groupings. Among those who identify as African-American the richest 10 percent
controlled 75 percent of all wealth; during Obama’s tenure the wealthiest 1 percent
increased their share of wealth amongst all African-Americans from 19.4 percent to
40.5 percent. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the bottom half of African-American
households have zero or negative wealth.
While a very narrow layer of black millionaires and billionaires has been deliber-
ately cultivated in response to the mass unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, the conditions
for working class African-Americans are worse than they were 40 years ago. This has
been the period of deindustrialization, which saw the systematic shutdown of auto,
steel and other factories across the United States, devastating working-class cities such
as Detroit, Milwaukee, and Youngstown, Ohio.
The major social gains won by workers in the bitter struggles of the 20th century
have been rolled back so that an immense amount of wealth could be transferred from
the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top. Poverty, declining life expectancy,
deaths of despair and other forms of social misery are drawing together workers of all
racial and national backgrounds.
It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history
by the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-mid-
dle-class layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and
around the world.
Earlier this year, auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico called on their American
counterparts, white and black, to join them in wildcat strikes. Across the South, black,
white and Hispanic workers took strike action together against telecommunications
giant AT&T. In Tennessee, black and white neighbors defended an immigrant working
class family against deportation. Now, the multi-racial and multi-ethnic American
auto industry labor force finds itself entering a pitched battle against the global auto
giants and the corrupt unions.
At the same time, opinion polls demonstrate growing support in the population
for socialism—that is, the conscious political unity of the working class across
all boundaries and divisions imposed on it. Under these conditions the American
capitalist elite, Democrats and Republican alike, are terrified of social revolution.
They are joining with their ruling class counterparts around the world in deploying
sectarian politics, be it based on race, religion, nationality, ethnicity or language to
block this development.
The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics
into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class.
The Democrats think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from
the reactionary, militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics.
The Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, was explicit in this regard, telling staffers
in a taped meeting in August that the narrative upon which the paper was focused
would change from “being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded
with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the pres-
ident’s character.” As a result, reporters will be directed to “write more deeply about
the country, race, and other divisions.”
Baquet declared:
[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the

American story … one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made
it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit
more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I
would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year
is going to be a huge part of the American story.
This focus on race is a mirror image of Trump’s own racial politics, and it bears
a disturbing resemblance to the race-based world view of the Nazis. The central role
of race in the politics of fascism was explained concisely in Trotsky’s analysis of the
ideology of German fascism:
In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race.
History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are
construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting “eco-
nomic thought” as base, National Socialism descends a stage lower: from
economic materialism it appeals to zoologic materialism.10
There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project
makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coor-
dinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary
race-based falsification of American and world history.
Above all the working class must reject any such effort to divide it, efforts which
will become ever more ferocious and pernicious as the class struggle develops. The great
issue of this epoch is the fight for the international unity of the working class against
all forms of racism, nationalism and related forms of identity politics.
10. Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?” accessed on 09/03/2019 at https://www.marxists.org/

archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm
A Slave Auction in the South, Harpers Weekly

“1619” and the myth of white unity under slavery
Book review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites
and Slavery in the Antebellum South
by Keri Leigh Merritt (Cambridge Press, 2017)
By Eric London
9 September 2019
In August, the New York Times launched the “1619” initiative, marking the 400th
anniversary of the disembarkation of the first African slaves in what was to become
the United States.
The historical premise of the Times campaign is that “white people,” as a race,
benefited from slavery economically, politically, and socially, and that even today, white
workers—an irredeemably racist “basket of deplorables,” in Hillary Clinton’s words—
continue to benefit from the privileges invented during slavery. The unstated agenda
is to sow racial divisions among workers and to forestall the growing movement of
the working class.
In the series’ lead article, Nikole Hannah-Jones cites a group of historians to claim
that “white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, ‘had a considerable
psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.’” In
the same issue, Matthew Desmond writes that the slave system “allowed [white workers]
to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement.”
In reality, the “facts” upon which the Times bases its claim that slavery produced
“white privilege” vary from half-truth to outright falsehood. The book Masterless
Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Press—2017)
by Keri Leigh Merritt, does much to set the record straight.
23
Merritt is an independent scholar, and her distance from academia is a strength.
A Southerner from a self-described poor and right-wing family, she has explained
that her goal is to uncover the historical roots of social backwardness and political
confusion in the South.
The vast majority of whites did not derive any social, political or economic benefits
from the system of slavery. On the contrary, Merritt explains:
Under capitalism, labor power was the commodity of the laborer. Conversely,
under feudalism, as well as under slavery, the ruling classes owned, either
completely or partially, the labor power of the working classes. The system was
predicated on elites coercing individuals to work, often by violent means. In
the slave South, where laborers were in competition with brutalized, enslaved
labor, the laborers, whether legally free or not, had little to no control over
their labor power. The profitability and profusion of plantation slave labor
consistently reduced the demand for free workers, lowered their wages, and
rendered their bargaining power ineffective, indeed generally (except in the
case of specialized skills) worthless. In essence, they were not truly “free”
laborers, especially when they could be arrested and forced to labor for the
state or for individuals.
A solely racial view of slavery in the American South is insufficient to grasp the
thoroughly reactionary character of the social order which arose on the rotten foun-
dations of human bondage. In the first half of the 19th century, an oligarchy basing
itself on slavery and aristocratic privilege enforced its rule through vigilante terror
and police-state dictatorship aimed at the whole non-slaveholding population, black
and white alike.
This slaveholding class, enriching itself through trade with the ruling classes of
aristocratic Europe, threatened to destroy the egalitarian and democratic principles of
the American Revolution. Secession of southern states in 1860–61, which the oligarchy
carried out in the face of broad opposition among poor whites, was a counterrevolu-
tionary rebellion from above against the principle enshrined in the Declaration of
Independence that “all men are created equal.”
Merritt begins by attacking the “myth” that whites were united in defense of
slavery, a lie first created by the political representatives of the slavocracy, then revived
by Jim Crow-era historians, and today pushed forward by the Times.
She takes up the Tennessee Agrarians school of Confederate apologists, including
historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, writing, “The antebellum South, Owsley incorrectly
asserted, was undoubtedly democratic in nature. Slavery, he claimed, was actually
beneficial for all whites, regardless of economic class and social status.” Instead, Mer-
ritt’s research led her to conclude, “One of the biggest and most persistent falsities of
southern history is revealed: the myth of white unity over slavery.”
Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South 25
The antebellum
South was defined by
extreme inequality not
only between slaveholders
and their human “prop-
erty,” but among whites.
In 1850, Merritt notes,
1,000 cotton-state fami-
lies received $50 million
per year in income, as
compared to $60 million
per year for the remaining
66,000 families. She also
North Carolina Emigrants; Poor White Folks by James Henry cites a study of Louisiana
Beard (1845)
which found 43 percent of
whites lived in urban areas in 1860, and that of these city dwellers 80 percent were
semi-skilled or unskilled workers. Meanwhile, half of rural white families were landless,
and half of those who owned land tilled less than 50 acres. Poor whites comprised the
vast majority of the free population, Merritt concludes, noting “only about 14 percent
of the state’s whites could be classified as middle class.”
In 1860, 56 percent of personal wealth of the United States was concentrated in
the South. In that region’s cotton belt, wealth in slaves accounted for 60 percent of
all wealth, greater even than the value of the land itself. As the price of slaves rose in
the final decade before the Civil War from $82,000 in 1850 to $120,000 in 1860 (in
2011 dollars), the concentration of slave ownership at the top of Southern society
increased dramatically. Slave ownership was far beyond the economic reach of even
most landowning whites.
The poorer whites who did own land were forced into unproductive terrain. As the
abolitionist National Era put it, “Slavery, with its biting social ills, beats them away
from the richer soil, and keeps them hopelessly down and debased on the barren hills.”
Merritt writes that one-third of whites in the South “had nothing more than clothing
and small sums of petty cash on the eve of secession.”
“Slave labor eliminated job possibilities, depressed wages where jobs existed, and
forced white wage workers into the most degraded and dangerous work deemed ‘too
hazardous for Negro property,’” Merritt explains. Whenever whites attempted to strike,
“they constantly were made aware of the thousands of readily available black strike-
breakers waiting to take their places should they ask for better wages or request safer
working conditions.”
Merritt quotes Richard Morris, historian of the American Revolution and onetime
president of the American Historical Association, who wrote: “a significant segment of
the southern labor force of both races operated under varying degrees of compulsion,
legal or economic, in a twilight zone of bondage…[they] dwelt in a shadowland enjoy-
ing a status neither fully slave nor entirely free.”
Despite their legal freedom, Merritt writes, “This grave economic stratification
between masters and non-masters meant that in material terms, the poorest southern
whites lived somewhat similarly to slaves.”
Whites lived in “one room shacks made of logs and mud,” normally without
windows. They had difficulty traveling from place to place, often in carts pulled by
dogs. Without shoes, hookworm was a constant concern, and starvation was a threat.
“Not having enough to eat was a constant worry for a sizable percentage of the white
population,” Merritt writes, citing one slave who said, “We had more to eat than they
did.” Of their white neighbors, the slave wrote, “They were sorry folk.”
Merritt cites historian Avery Craven, who “identified several similarities between
the material lives of poor whites and slaves. Their cabins differed ‘little in size or
comfort,’ he wrote, as both were constructed from chinked logs and generally had
only one room. Furthermore, these two underclasses ‘dressed in homespuns, [and]
went barefoot in season… The women of both classes toiled in the fields or carried
the burden of other manual labor and the children of both early reached the age of
industrial accountability.’ Even the food they prepared and ate, Craven concluded, ‘was
strikingly similar.’”
White men often spent months apart from their families as they walked through
the country looking for work. “In contrast to the low divorce rates of the upper class,”
Merritt writes, “poor whites’ relationships were similar to slaves in some respects” due
to this lack of economic stability.
Alcoholism and illiteracy were widespread. The southern antislavery advocate
Hinton Helper explained that among Southern whites, “Thousands ... die at an
advanced age, as ignorant of the common alphabet as if it had never been invented.”
While a widespread system of “common school” public education had taken root in
the North, there were hardly any schools in the antebellum South. Curtailing access to
public education was a deliberate measure to socially control whites who were natural
opponents of slavery. As Merritt explains:
Whether the means involved disenfranchising poor whites, keeping them

uneducated and illiterate, heavily policing them and monitoring their behav-
iors, or simply leaving them to wallow in cyclical poverty, the ends were
always the same: the South’s master class continued to lord over the region,
attempting to control an increasingly unwieldy hierarchy. Slaveholders’ worst
fears were coming to pass as the ranks of disaffected poor whites grew. As
one editorial out of South Carolina contended, the biggest danger to south-
ern society was neither northern abolitionists nor black slaves. Instead, the
owners of flesh needed to concern themselves with the masterless men and
women in their own neighborhoods—this “servile class of mechanics and
laborers, unfit for self-government, and yet clothed with the attributes and
powers of citizens.”
The dictatorship of the slave oligarchy

To maintain order under conditions of extreme social inequality, the Southern oligarchs
subjected not only slaves, but also poor whites to physical coercion, paramilitary terror
and police surveillance. The society they ruled was an aristocratic order in which the
Constitution was a dead letter.
An entire legal code was established to police non-slaveholding whites. The South’s
first police forces and prison systems were established “to impose social and racial
conformity,” with police “jailing individuals for the most benign behavioral infractions.
Indeed, the rise of professional law enforcement changed the entire system of criminal
justice.” In the antebellum it was whites who filled the new jails, since black property
was too valuable to remove from labor through incarceration. White convicts were sub-
jected to brutal acts of public whipping and even water torture. Slaveowners illegalized
trade between poor whites and slaves and arrested whites suspected of befriending or
engaging in sexual relationships with slaves.
Slaveowners built vigilante groups, especially following the devastating Panic
of 1837, “in an effort to force the population into acquiescence.” They were not, as
the Times claims, comprised merely of “white people,” but rather of wealthy white
people. Merritt explains that these vigilante groups were:
[E]ssentially bands of slave- and property-holders who monitored both the

behaviors and beliefs of less affluent whites. [Historian Charles] Bolton
described the targeted whites as those “whose poverty or indolence made
them undesirable.” Slaveless whites increasingly found themselves inhabiting
a world in which they had to censor every utterance and defend every action.
Under the direction of this oligarchic terror:
[L]ocal mobs lynching and killing poorer whites abounded in the late ante-
bellum period. The majority of those brutalized were accused of abolitionism
of some sort—whether they were distributing reading materials, talking to
other non-slaveholders about worker’s rights, or simply seemed too friendly
with African Americans.
This contradicts the Times’ blanket indictment that “slave patrols throughout the
nation were created by white people who were fearful of rebellion,” and showed “our
nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people.”
Far from gaining political privilege as a result of slavery, poor whites’ supposed
rights existed at the mercy of the masters. They could be jailed without charge, arrested
for “vagrancy,” and even executed for committing property crimes like burglary and
forgery. As Merritt notes, “for all intents and purposes, due process was nullified.”
Tellingly, poor whites were barred from reading abolitionist literature, and could
be executed for engaging in political speech threatening to the great plantation owners.
Poor whites were effectively barred from voting as they desired, casting ballots viva
voce as the slave-owning election monitors who controlled their employment prospects
and store credit looked on.
Poor whites were sometimes auctioned off into indentured servitude for defaulting
on loans. White children—including young Abraham Lincoln and his presidential
successor, Andrew Johnson—were also “bound out as indentures” either by their
impoverished parents or where a judge found the parents “immoral.”
Merritt explains that “binding out was an arrangement not unlike slavery in
many respects,” and in the years preceding secession, a section of slave owners even
advocated the enslavement of whites as well as the re-enslavement of freed blacks. Some
dark-skinned whites were captured and enslaved. Those who found themselves in this
fate, by the 1850s had the burden to prove they were not black.
The emergence of white opposition to slavery in the 1850s

Outcast from the profits of the slave system and subject to the dictatorial conditions of
the oligarchic government, slaveless whites developed a profound sense of their class
position, Merritt explains—as did the slaveowners themselves.
She references the private diaries and public statements of many slaveowners,
including “Christopher Memminger, a wealthy Charlestonian slaveholder, [who]
argued that white workers—especially foreign ones—were ‘the only party from which
danger to our institutions is to be apprehended among us.’ Poor white laborers, who
had to compete with unpaid and underpaid black laborers, ‘would soon raise the hue
and cry against the Negro, and be hot abolitionists—and every one of those men
would have a vote.’”
Further, “By the middle of the 1850s, the cracks that had always been present
within the façade of white racial solidarity finally turned into deep fissures. When the
Panic of 1857 hit and wealth inequality continued to deepen, slaveholders realized that
they had to be proactive in the defense of their property and power.”
As inequality grew and as the South slowly industrialized in the 1850s (by 1860,
10.5 percent of white men in Alabama worked in manufacturing), emerging trade
union associations began holding meetings and publishing statements demanding
abolition of slavery.
Merritt quotes a group of workers in Lexington, Kentucky, who resolved that slavery
“degraded labor, enervated industry, interfered with the occupations of free laborers,
created a gulf between the rich and the poor, deprived the working classes of education,
and tended to drive them out of the state.” The white workers concluded that “public
and private right ” required slavery’s “ultimate extinction.”
Rebel Deserters Coming Within Union Lines, Harpers Weekly (1864)
When the seceding states held conventions and voted on disunion, Merritt explains
that white workers and poor farmers overwhelmingly voted against. This contradicts
the Times’ presentation of poor whites as actively supporting or silently acquiescing to
slavery—“they generally accepted their lot,” in the condescending phrase of Matthew
Desmond. In fact, secession was rammed through in fraudulent elections by slaveown-
ers in a desperate attempt to save their slave system both from Northern Republicans
and from the prospects of disunion from within. A war to establish slavery in the west
(and likely in the Caribbean and Latin America) was needed to prop up a slave order
that was crumbling from within. The slaveowners carried out their rebellion in order
to preempt this movement from below.
Merritt writes: “Regardless of their professions, one thing was clear. Secession, the
Confederacy, and Civil War were all overwhelmingly the creations of one small class of
Americans: wealthy southern slaveholders.”
The lack of support among poor whites for the Confederate war effort and the
active opposition from below was a major factor in the South’s military collapse in
1864 and 1865, as explained by David Williams in Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner
Civil War and Victoria Bynum in Free State of Jones, upon which the 2016 film by the
same title was based.
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the myth of “white privilege”

Merritt’s work disproves the assertions by the Times that slavery was a popular institu-
tion among all white southerners and that all whites obtained special privileges under
slavery. These arguments, based on distortions, lies, and simply leaving aside contra-
dictory evidence, amount to a rehashing of the segregationist myth of the solid South.
Yet Merritt ultimately asserts in her book’s conclusion that with the end of Recon-
struction, poor whites obtained a privileged position in Southern society relative to
poor blacks. She writes:
Poor whites began as pariahs in the antebellum era because they had no
real place in the slave system and therefore actually threatened it. With the
emancipation of African Americans, poor whites were finally brought into
the system of white privilege, albeit at the bottom. This inclusion nonetheless
placed them higher on the southern social hierarchy than freedmen, and they
gained certain legal, political, and social advantages solely based upon race.
The historian cannot be taken to task for ending her study with the conclusion
of the Civil War. Class and race relations in the South after the Civil War comprise a
vast and complicated subject. However, having demonstrated, contrary to the morality
tale of the Times’ Project 1619, that poor whites in the antebellum South did not
benefit from slavery, Merritt baldly asserts that after the Civil War, they did. This is an
unfortunate conclusion that not only vitiates against her previous analysis. It is false
and necessitates a reply.
The Civil War and its major achievements—the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth
Amendment, etc.—represented a dramatic step forward for all workers. Furthermore,
for a brief moment during the period of “Radical Reconstruction” immediately follow-
ing the Civil War, there was a dramatic improvement in the political position of both
the freed slaves and poor whites, with both groups flocking to the Republican Party.
However, the Republican Party was a capitalist party. Having carried out the
“second American Revolution,” which included the largest seizure of private property
in world history prior to the Russian Revolution, it proved to be far more assertive in
representing the interests of private property and the railroad corporations than in
defending the interests and rights of the freed slaves. Over the course of the 1870s, the
radical Reconstruction policies were whittled away, and abandoned altogether in the
“Great Compromise” between the southern Democrats and northern Republicans in
the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876.
In the reaction that followed, the former slave-owning class, deprived of their
human property but not of their land, continued to view forced racial division as neces-
sary for maintaining social order and defending extreme levels of social inequality. The
political mechanism through which this was achieved was, as before, the Democratic
Party, this time overseeing a political monopoly based on Jim Crow segregation—whose
aim was the total division of black workers from white.
Merritt concludes that, while poor whites “actually threatened” the status quo
under slavery, they did not threaten post-slavery property relations because they “had
a place” in post-Reconstruction Southern segregation due to their “privilege” in con-
trast to blacks. She does not explain what this alleged “privilege” consisted of, but it
was nowhere to be found for the millions of white southerners who were subsumed,
alongside blacks, in the crop-lien system of agriculture known as sharecropping.
Neither did poor southern whites benefit politically from the extreme oppression of
blacks. Beginning in the 1890s, the Southern elite imposed a series of restrictions on the
vote that virtually barred blacks from participating in elections, and drastically reduced
the involvement of whites, among them poll taxes (fees levied at the voting booth),
literacy tests, and the “grandfather clause” which required voters to demonstrate that
their grandfathers had been voting citizens.
As for social improvements, the South remained the most backward region of the
country, with massive poverty for both races, poor infrastructure, low levels of liter-
acy, and short life expectancies. Poor blacks and whites remained in objective terms
exploited by the white Southern ruling class and, behind it, the railroad companies,
the banks and the corporations in the North and Northeast. As historians like C. Vann
Woodward and Eric Foner have established, postwar Southern racism was fanned from
above by a Southern ruling class that was terrified over the prospect that poor whites
and blacks would act upon their common interests.
None of this lessens the horrific reality that thousands of blacks were lynched,
tens of thousands more thrown in jail, and blacks as an entire segment of Southern
society were forced into legal and social second-class citizenship in what was, in all
but name, a racial caste system. Skin color made a qualitative difference in the life of
a Southern person living under Jim Crow.
But segregation did not provide poor whites with positive political or social benefits
that would lead to an improvement of their living standards. In economic and political
terms, racial segregation drove wages down for all races, it reduced social spending on
schools, hospitals and other social services, and the backward political and cultural
climate that dominated the South well into the mid-20th century has created conditions
for the hyper-exploitation of all white and black workers that remains today.
In a larger sense, regardless of what an individual poor white person thought (and
racism was not the sole property of the rich), the segregationist system did not provide
the majority of whites with “privilege” because segregation ultimately blocked the
development of a united movement from below, which was the only thing that could
have improved the living conditions of all Southern workers and farmers.
The political and material roots of racist ideology

As Woodward showed in his landmark The Strange Career of Jim Crow, segregation,
and all that it entailed, took decades to implement. It was not until the first years of the
20th century that it reached its full dimensions—the near-total segregation of public
space, the stamping out of democratic rights, and the ready use of violent “southern
justice” and the lynch mob to prop it all up. And it came in direct response to a political
movement of poor whites and blacks that posed an existential threat to slavocracy’s
heirs in “the New South.”
The post-Reconstruction development of the class struggle across the US, including
in the South, gave impetus to a powerful tendency among black and white workers and
poor farmers toward unity against the corporations. It was this objective process which
organically undercut the racial politics of the Southern Democratic elites. Faced with
the threat posed by the Farmers Alliances and Populist movements of the post-Recon-
struction period, rich whites, aided by the strikebreakers in the Ku Klux Klan, asserted
that efforts to mobilize small farmers and workers against the big landowners and the
corporations (especially in unity with black sharecroppers) threatened the system of
“white supremacy.”
Woodward describes how thousands of poor white and black farmers filled the
small towns of Georgia in the early 1890s, traveling great distances to hear Congress-
man Tom Watson declare that the People’s Party opposed racism and would “make
lynch law odious to the people.” Woodward wrote of southern Populism at its apex:
Under Watson’s tutelage the Southern white masses were beginning to learn
to regard the Negro as a political ally bound to them by economic ties and
a common destiny, rather than as a slender prop to injured self-esteem in
the shape of “White Supremacy.” Here was a foundation of political realism
upon which some more enduring structure of economic democracy might
be constructed. Never before or since have the two races in the South come
so close together as they did during the Populist struggles.1
The catastrophic breakup of this burgeoning alliance was in large part the product
of widespread farmer dissatisfaction with the People’s Party’s rotten “fusion” with the
Democratic Party, both in the 1894 midterm elections and in 1896 with the party’s
nomination of Nebraskan agrarian Democrat William Jennings Bryan as its presiden-
tial candidate, who had previously secured the nomination of the Democratic Party.
This event, hypocritically facilitated by Watson himself, deflated the Populist wave
and opened up a period of bitter reaction across the country. This should serve as a
historical lesson for those who argue today that “left” causes will be aided by working
within the confines of the Democratic Party.
In the South, the Democratic Party capitalized on the mood of defeat to drastically
expand Jim Crow segregation, making a breakthrough in their decades-long effort to
divide poor whites and blacks against one another. In May 1896, when the plan for
Bryan’s nomination was far advanced, the Supreme Court gave pseudo-legal cover
to the doctrine of “separate but equal” in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
1. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, (1938; 1955) Google Books.
The lynching of Leo Frank, August 17, 1915

The historian Robert Wiebe wrote that “the movement for Jim Crow revived after
1896.” Referencing the decline of Populism, Wiebe adds:
The viciousness with which Southern farmers and townsmen attacked the
Negro after 1896 told a story of the community’s failure … Along with that
lingering suspicion of immigrants came an increasingly elaborate race
theory, designed to cover all peoples, and the spread of a cold, formalized
anti-Semitism. Throughout America a residual fear had shrunk the outer
limits of optimism.2
Tom Watson, as Woodward explains, became a vicious racist, rejoining the

Democratic Party and notoriously inflaming public opinion against Jewish factory
manager Leo Frank when the latter was falsely charged with the 1913 murder of a
13-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta. Watson called Frank a “libertine Jew”
and demanded his death in his newspaper, the Jeffersonian, contradicting his earlier
statements by writing, “Lynch law is a good sign; it shows that justice lives among the
people.” A mob killed Frank on August 17, 1915.
The political degeneration expressed by Watson’s transformation was not inevitable
or predestined by intrinsic racism or popular Southern “bitterness” over the defeat of
the Confederacy in the Civil War. That position has far more in common with the Lost
2. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 110.
Cause historians than the New York Times’ “1619” promoters would care to admit.
A different trend was expressed, for example, in the Alabama-born anarchist editor
Albert Parsons, who had served as a young man in the Confederate Army and would
be hanged in 1887 in Illinois after the Haymarket provocation. Parsons wrote of his
break with the Confederacy:
I have made some enemies. My enemies in the South States consisted of those
who oppressed the black-slave. My enemies in the North are among those who
would perpetuate the slavery of the wage-slave.3
Merritt cites Karl Marx’s statement from his writings on the American Civil
War that “Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black
skin.” Marx continues, “But out of the death of slavery a new, rejuvenated life sprouted
immediately.”
The abolition of slavery triggered a massive growth of manufacturing, in particu-
lar in the Northern cities, and opened up the prospect for great revolutionary struggles
of the working class, which rapidly manifested in the explosive railroad rebellion of
1877. That strike witnessed powerful united demonstrations of white and black workers
in places like St. Louis, where the Workingman’s Party fought for the unity of workers
of all races in the fight against the railroad barons.
Since the end of World War II, the South has undergone heavy industrialization,
transforming states like Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina from agricultural back-
waters into the “sun belt” of manufacturing and production. This is a component of
a global process, in which the international integration of the world economy has
transformed China, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India and even sections of Africa into
centers of world production, bringing billions of workers into the process of production.
All over the world, traditions of racial and religious chauvinism are being undercut
by objective economic developments and advances in communications and transport.
The chief task of the present political situation is to establish the unity of this
powerful international working class, regardless of race, nationality, gender, sexual
orientation, or any other dividing line, in a common global fight against the capitalist
system. This requires a fight against all forms of historical falsification, including
efforts to portray American slavery as having conferred on white workers a “privilege”
from which they still benefit. Ultimately this argument is another chapter in the Amer-
ican ruling class’s long history of employing race to divide and conquer.
Merritt’s book is a critical contribution to this fight, undermining the claim that
poor and working-class whites benefited from slavery. It is hoped that she, along with
other honest historians, will reevaluate the assumption that they were beneficiaries of
the racial oppression under Jim Crow.
3. Albert R. Parsons, Autobiography, accessed September 2, 2019: http://memory.loc.gov/award/ichihay/
m07/m07.htm
Why are reparations for slavery an issue
in the 2020 US elections?
By Niles Niemuth
21 June 2019
A contentious hearing was held Wednesday before the US House Judiciary Committee
on Bill H.R. 40, that would establish a congressional commission to study and consider
a national apology and reparations for slavery and succeeding racial and economic
discrimination against African Americans.
The bill, sponsored by Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Hous-
ton, Texas, was first introduced by the former Congressman John Conyers in 1989 and
at every annual session since for nearly three decades. Wednesday, however, marked
the first time that a bill relating to reparations for slavery was considered by the full
committee.
Despite the widespread coverage in the media, including front page and op-ed
treatment in the New York Times, there is no mass upswell of popular sentiment for
reparations. In fact, a 2018 poll found that just 26 percent of Americans supported
monetary reparations for the descendants of slaves.
At a time when social inequality is driving a growing movement of workers and
youth, the issue is being deliberately promoted by the Democratic Party to inject racial
divisions into the heart of the 2020 election campaign.
The formation of a commission has been co-sponsored by Tulsi Gabbard, Eric
Swalwell and Tim Ryan, three of the four current Democratic Representatives running
for the party’s presidential nomination. The bill also has the backing of Massachusetts
Senator Elizabeth Warren and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, both presidential can-
didates. Booker was the first person to testify at Wednesday’s hearing.
The panel included a cross section of privileged, upper-middle class African Amer-
icans, from author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a strong supporter of Barack Obama who spoke
35
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Danny Glover testified at the Congressional hearing on H.R. 40
out in favor of reparations, to retired American football player Burgess Owens, who
used his time to oppose reparations from the far-right, delivering a screed denouncing
socialism and Marxism.
The call for reparations raises complex political and historical questions that are
nowhere addressed by any of those taking up the demand.
With no living survivors of the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery, it is impos-
sible to place it in the framework of legal reparations. How would such reparations be
paid and by whom? By the direct descendants of slave holders? Only by those who had
ancestors living in the US during the period of slavery? By all whites? Or would it be
extracted from society as a whole?
By what mechanism, moreover, would it be established who is eligible to receive
reparations for slavery? Since race has no biological foundation, would the proponents
of reparations return to the racist “one drop” rule that prevailed in the south to deter-
mine who is black? Or would they object to paying reparations to the many Americans
with African slave ancestors who identify as white, and therefore presumably benefit
from “white privilege”?
Moreover, why limit reparations to African Americans? The story of the United
States is one of countless tragedies and historical injustices affecting every segment of
the working class, from the Irish, Chinese and Germans to Italians and Jews. And of
course, there are the many tribes of Native Americans, who had their land stolen and
treaties with the federal government routinely broken. With many today still living
on remote reservations, they suffer rates of poverty and police violence higher than
African Americans.
Proponents of reparations transform race into the fundamental category that
is the essential framework for understanding all American history. Chattel slavery
Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections? 37
is seen as just one episode in an enduring reign of “white supremacy,” which was
simply continued after the Civil War in another form of racial oppression, Jim Crow
segregation and housing discrimination, and continues in the current period with
mass incarceration.
In fact, slavery was a system of socio-economic exploitation, with a global reach,
stretching from the heart of the African continent to the sugar plantations of the
Caribbean and the dockyards of Great Britain. It was abolished in the United States more
than 150 years ago after a monumental civil war, the Second American Revolution.
Those promoting reparations display a complete indifference to the actual his-
torical experience. They ignore and dismiss the significance of the Civil War, in which
the working class played a critical role. The hundreds of thousands who paid for the
bondsmen’s freedom with their lives were overwhelmingly white, motivated by an
ideological and political struggle against slavery.
It was understood by the most advanced political thinkers at the time that there
was a fundamental connection between the development of a working-class movement
against capitalism and the elimination of slavery. Karl Marx noted in Capital: “[E]very
independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a
part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the
black it is branded.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the oppression of African Americans was linked to
the development of modern capitalism and the class struggle. Racism was consciously
stoked by the elites and demagogues to divide white and black workers. Campaigns of
terrorism and lynchings were carried out by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to enforce
divisions between black and white workers and tenant farmers.
The Civil Rights movement developed in the 1950s and 1960s as a mass movement,
uniting blacks and whites, in the fight for the enforcement of legal equality for all. At
the end of his life, one of the leaders of that movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., called
for a Poor Peoples March to demand economic justice for all, regardless of race.
However, in the half century since the end of the Civil Rights movement, there
has been an enormous effort, led by the Democratic Party, to separate the social issues
that confront African American workers from the working class as a whole. The result
of policies such as Affirmative Action has been a social disaster for those at the bottom
and the enrichment of a tiny layer of black millionaires and billionaires.
The fundamental dividing line in American society—and world capitalism as a
whole—is class, not race, nationality or gender. The reparations bill refers to the fact
that African Americans have “an unemployment rate more than twice the current white
unemployment rate; and an average of less than 1/16 of the wealth of white families, a
disparity which has worsened, not improved over time.” It says nothing, however, of the
class disparity among African Americans, or among whites. Never has the wealth gap
between rich and working-class blacks been greater, and the same goes for everyone
else, regardless of skin color.
Lincoln with McClellan and Union troops at Antietam, October 3, 1862

The basic issues confronting African American workers—unemployment, poverty,
debt, attacks on wages and health care, police violence, war—are the issues confronting
all workers, white and black, immigrant and native born. Under these conditions,
to propose that a social program be developed to benefit one or another ethnicity is
repugnant.
The demand for monetary reparations has the unpleasant odor of a financial scam.
Figures like Coates and Booker do not speak for the working class, but for a layer of the
upper middle class who are seeking to affect a more equitable distribution of wealth at
the top of society. If a racial reparations program ever did get passed through Congress,
one can be certain that it would only benefit upper middle class African Americans and
leave workers scrounging for crumbs from the table.
It has, moreover, the clear character of a political scam. Under conditions of
growing class struggle internationally, its purpose is to divide workers against each
other and preserve the social and economic system, capitalism, that is at the root of all
the ills, including racism, confronting the working class as a whole. In this regard, it
serves a similar function as Trump’s fascistic appeals to anti-immigrant chauvinism.
The Socialist Equality Party does not support reparations. It fights for the unity of
the working class in the struggle for genuine equality. The vast wealth monopolized by
the rich must be expropriated, and the giant corporations turned into democratically
controlled utilities, run on the basis of social need, not private profit. This is the fight
for socialism, in the United States and around the world.
The attacks on Green Book and the
racialist infection of the affluent middle
class
By David Walsh and Joanne Laurier
8 March 2019
As the WSWS previously noted, the decision to bestow the Best Picture award on Green
Book (directed by Peter Farrelly) at the Academy Awards on February 24 triggered a
furious response in the American media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles
Times and elsewhere.
How dare the Academy honor a work that suggested whites and blacks could get
along, that they might even learn from each other and overcome prejudices, and that,
indeed, social progress depended upon such interactions! What outdated, regressive,
hopelessly naïve views! Bridge the gap between “white America” and “black America”?
What a fantasy!
The official media spoke almost as one: Green Book, with its suggestion that
human beings can be enlightened and undergo change (in this case, an Italian Amer-
ican worker from the Bronx), is primarily designed to make whites “feel good” when
the reality, according to such elements, is that the white population is thoroughly
racist, now and forever.
The outpouring continues. The racialist infection of the affluent middle class,
including its “left” elements, has reached an advanced stage. In many cases, and we
write this advisedly, there is not a great deal of difference between the current infection
39
and the fascist-nationalist ideology that helped produce such immense tragedy in the
first half of the 20th century. Something deeply sick and reactionary is occurring in
these layers.
At the same time, popular sentiment in favor of Green Book is considerable.
Some of the vile reviews and columns have provoked a response, including in online
commentary.
A social and moral divide has opened up, on this question as on many, between
the cynical, selfish petty bourgeoisie, obsessed with its wealth and advancement—and
the great majority of the working population, essentially decent and democratic in
its outlook and, in fact, relatively generous in its attitude toward differences and tol-
erant of human foibles. ( Green Book, in fact, won the People’s Choice Award at the
Toronto International Film Festival last September, a fact which the film’s detractors
find revealing and unforgivable.)
Summing up the state of affairs, Indiewire noted that the victory of Green Book at
the Academy Awards “was immediately met with outrage from movie journalists and
critics on social media, who all felt a sense of déjà vu in watching a polarizing drama
about race relations.” Polarizing? This is not a case of a film with some dubious or
inflammatory, possibly right-wing message. The “polarization” in this case occurs
between this crowd of hardened racialists in the media, official politics and the uni-
versities and the general public, which is moving in another direction.
Again, for those who have not seen Green Book, it concerns an Italian-American
bouncer, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) who is hired as a driver and escort
for black pianist, Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), during a tour of the Midwest and
Jim Crow South in 1962. The script was co-written by Vallelonga’s son. Over the course
of the two months, the two men become close. One of the film’s most poignant moments
occurs after Vallelonga has discovered, as the result of an unhappy incident involving
the police, that Shirley is gay. “I’ve been working nightclubs in New York City my whole
life,” Vallelonga says. “I know it’s a... complicated world.”
There are Hollywood-esque aspects of the film and no doubt a certain simplifi-
cation takes place of a highly complicated and intense event and relationship. Some
of that, however, is almost inevitable when such thorny issues are involved. All in all,
this is a popular film working at a high level, that both entertains and sheds light on
important matters.
In any case, the racially obsessed commentators are not criticizing Green Book for
its weaknesses, but its considerable strengths. The notion, for example, that a piece of
trash such as Black Panther or Spike Lee’s poorly constructed and tedious—and in its
most “political” sections, utterly contrived and unconvincing—BlacKkKlansman was
more worthy of the Best Picture award is simply laughable. The bitter complaints
directed against Green Book (along with Lee’s own disgraceful performance at the
award ceremony) have next to nothing to do with the film’s art, and nearly everything
to do with its social outlook and optimism.
Green Book and the racialist infection of the affluent middle class 41
Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book
Lest we be accused of exaggerating the pernicious assault on Green Book, it is

necessary to cite more passages than we would care to from its treatment in the media.
Heaping scorn on the possibility of whites and blacks getting along has been a
favorite theme. Vanity Fair magazine, for example, commented: “Green Book purports
to be about racial reconciliation, a popular sentiment among people who want every-
one, holding hands, to take responsibility for ending white supremacy—not just its
beneficiaries. It’s a troubling, tedious idea, but a very common one—rooted, I think,
in a desire to be forgiven.”
Teen Vogue argued brilliantly that “Green Book Won Best Picture at the Oscars
Because it Made White People Feel Good About Themselves.” Apparently, “white people”
should only “Feel Bad” about themselves. This kind of reactionary rhetoric helps drive
layers of the population into the arms of the extreme right.
One of the fouler pieces, which we have commented on previously, appeared in
the New York Times prior to the Academy Awards, “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for
Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” ( January 23), by Wesley Morris. In that piece, Morris
counterposed Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) to Green Book. He described Lee’s miserable
film as a “masterpiece about a boiled-over pot of racial animus in Brooklyn.” That movie,
he asserted, “dramatized a starker truth—we couldn’t all just get along.” In 1989, Lee
“was pretty much on his own as a voice of black racial reality … He helped plant the seeds
for an environment in which black artists can look askance at race.” As opposed to those
who “had been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies,” Lee understood, according to
Morris, that “closure is impossible because the blood is too bad, too historically American.”
Morris followed up this foulness by taking part in a conversation about the Acad-
emy Awards with two other New York Times critics, A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis
(“What ‘Green Book’ Says About the Academy. Our Critics on the Oscars,” February 25).
(It apparently doesn’t occur to either Morris, Scott or Dargis, in their petty bour-
geois blindness and obtuseness, that their very intellectual and personal cooperation
puts the lie to their opposition to “racial-reconciliation fantasies.” How do they, two
white people and one black, “get along”? Why aren’t they at each other throats before
10 minutes has passed?)
In the course of the three-way discussion, Scott complained that “the best picture
trophy went to a movie whose best friend is black [sic], a movie that doesn’t see color, a
movie about how all lives matter.” Horrors! Aside from the fact that the claim is patently
untrue—racism, both in Vallelonga’s family and in the Deep South, is a very active
issue in Green Book —the reader is evidently supposed to respond with indignation
to the fact that the movie “doesn’t see color” and suggests “all lives matter.”
That such views are anathema within this milieu, and that Scott and company see
nothing objectionable about holding such reactionary views, is an indication of how
far to the right this well-heeled liberal and even “left” layer has moved.
The Guardian in Britain (of course!) chimed in to claim, in a column by Joseph
Harker, that “Green Book ’s Oscar shows Hollywood still doesn’t get race—A best picture
for this trite, nostalgic white-centred tale? The academy wants us to believe racism no
longer exists.” On the contrary, of course, Farrelly is obviously disturbed by present-day
conditions, including the growth of the extreme right and fascistic forces encouraged
by the Trump administration, and intends his work to be a cautionary tale.
Harker, like many of the critics, objects strenuously to the notion that Vallelonga,
“a racist white driver,” is “somehow ‘saved’ by his black passenger.” This was one of
Morris’ themes too, in his January 23 piece, in which he denounced Green Book for
its “particularly perverse fantasy” that “absolution resides in a neutered black man
needing a white guy not only to protect and serve him, but to love him, too.” This is
not only malicious, but stupid. In any event, as we have previously noted, the civilizing
influence of one human being or layer of the population on another is simply ruled
out of order by this logic.
Another particularly repellent and provocative piece, by Justin Chang, appeared
in the Los Angeles Times on February 24. Chang, a LA Times film critic and identity
politics zealot, is especially venomous: “Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is
insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch.
It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem,
a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. ‘Green Book’ is an
embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.”
Chang goes on in this right-wing vein at considerable length. To a certain extent,
the review has to be read to be believed.
The LA Times critic acknowledges that his views are not popular: “I can tell I’ve
already annoyed some of you, though if you take more offense at what I’ve written
than you do at ‘Green Book,’ there may not be much more to say. Differences in taste
are nothing new, but there is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked
by this particular picture that
makes reasonable disagree-
ment unusually difficult. Maybe
‘Green Book’ really is the movie
of the year after all—not the
best movie, but the one that
best captures the polarization
that arises whenever the con-
versation shifts toward matters
of race, privilege and the all-im-
portant question of who gets to
tell whose story.”
Yes, we will point out once
again, the “polarization” exists
between this aspiring, grasping
petty bourgeois and wide layers
of the population struggling to
get by economically and hostile
to the obsession with racial and
Don Shirley
gender politics.
An interview published in the Nation (“Hollywood Is Still a Sundown Town for
Black Representation,” February 26) pointed to this social reality. In speaking to film-
maker Yoruba Richen, who has made a documentary about The Negro Motorist Green
Book (the starting point for Farrelly’s Green Book, published between 1936 and 1966),
interviewer Aaron Ross Coleman asked what call to action—in response to Farrelly’s
film—Richen envisioned, “whether it’s supporting black-owned businesses or maybe
a call for more investment in them?” And Richen replied, “I would say, support black-
owned businesses, support black stories, let’s change the narratives. It’s about high
time. Let’s change the narrative and take control of our own image and representation.”
Identity politics is an immense and profitable industry. A substantial social stratum
has a heavy investment in it. The lives and careers of thousands of people are thor-
oughly bound up with it. What would be left of a filmmaker like Spike Lee or a critic
like Chang if racial and gender politics were removed? Very little.
Aside from their selfishness and ambition, these wealthy social layers, including
upper middle class and bourgeois African Americans, are increasingly terrified of a
unified movement of workers from below because it threatens their class position and
privileges. To divide the working class along racial, ethnic and gender lines is essential
for the defense of American capitalism. (It is no accident that David Duke, the former
KKK leader, has expressed admiration for Spike Lee and that white supremacists found
much to praise in Black Panther. Racialism and chauvinism are the province of the
far right.)
Chang’s comment was so egregious that it provoked an angry response. The LA
Times was obliged to post some of the replies in “Criticism of ‘Green Book’s’ Oscar win
by The Times’ Justin Chang sparks strong reader reaction” (February 28).
One reader commented, “Just as Justin Chang said I would, I take offense at his
review of the best picture Oscar winner, ‘Green Book.’ ‘Reasonable disagreement’?
No, it was a hatchet job; the film was great.” A second wrote, “I find this ‘Green Book’
backlash ridiculous. This is a film about two men, opposites, who through a dangerous
journey found friendship and grew to have each other’s backs. They changed each
other’s lives on countless levels.” A third asked, “Must we also loathe such films as ‘To
Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Glory’ because of the sin of a white perspective?” One reader
observed, “As an African American, I was offended by the presumption that only black
audiences can take the moral high road on matters of race. Really? Folly, arrogance
and cruelty come in all colors. Don’t tell us what is white and what is black.”
A number of prominent figures, some of whom actually knew Don Shirley, also
responded positively and powerfully to Green Book.
In December, legendary African American music producer Quincy Jones addressed
the audience at a screening of Farrelly’s film in Los Angeles. According to Deadline,
Jones said, “I hope that you all enjoyed this very special film about friendship and the
power of music to bring people together … I had the pleasure of being acquainted
with Don Shirley while I was working as an arranger in New York in the ’50s, and he
was without question one of America’s greatest pianists … as skilled a musician as
Leonard Bernstein or Van Cliburn. … So it is wonderful that his story is finally being
told and celebrated. Mahershala [Ali], you did an absolutely fantastic job playing him,
and I think yours and Viggo’s [Mortensen] performances will go down as one of the
great friendships captured on film.”
Deadline reported that Jones added, “I did that ‘Chitlin Circuit’ tour through
the South when I was with the Lionel Hampton band, and let me tell you … it was
no picnic. And we were a band. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to do it
alone with just a driver. So Peter [Farrelly, the film’s director-writer], thank you for
telling this story of our country’s not-so-distant history and capturing on film the ties
that can bind us when we spend time listening, talking and living with one another.”
More recently, 92-year-old Harry Belafonte, the singer, songwriter and actor,
answered critics of the film. (Significantly, Belafonte has a role in Lee’s BlacKkKlans-
man.) In an email, he commented, “My wife Pamela and I just finished watching Green
Book and although I don’t usually do this, I am compelled to drop this note to thank
the filmmakers for having made this film for us all to see. I knew Don Shirley, and, in
fact, had an office across the street from his at Carnegie Hall, and I experienced much
of what he did at the same time. This movie is accurate, it is true, and it’s a wonderful
movie that everyone should see.
“The few people who appear to be objecting to the film’s depiction of the time and
the man are dead wrong, and, if the basis of their resentment stems from it having
been written and/or directed by someone who isn’t African American, I disagree with
them even more. There are many perspectives from which to tell the same story and
all can be true.
“I personally thank the filmmakers for having told this important story from a
very different lens, one no less compelling than any other.
“So again, I say to the filmmakers, thank you, and congratulations.”
In a piece in the Hollywood Reporter (“Why the ‘Green Book’ Controversies Don’t
Matter,” January 14), basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar defended the film against
its racialist critics. As his final argument, he took up “the question of whether the story
should have been told by three white men: director and co-writer Peter Farrelly, Nick
Vallelonga (Tony’s son) and co-producer Brian Currie. Artistically, it shouldn’t make
a difference. A good artist must be able to re-create characters who are different than
themselves. While I’m aware that blacks in the film industry need greater representa-
tion—and I strongly advocate for them—I’m also aware that this was a passion project
that might not have been made if not for the commitment of these men.”
At an event in New York City in January, a group of Don Shirley’s friends strongly
defended the film. Indiewire, before it discovered how “reprehensible” the film was,
reported, for example, that former friend and piano student “Michael Kappeyne told
the crowd, ‘I believe I speak for all of [his friends] when I say that this has been a
wonderful experience, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful movie for so many reasons.’ …
Choking up, he continued, ‘We are really thrilled with Dr. Shirley’s portrayal, because
we think it’s right on the money, we feel the dignity, we feel the wariness, we feel some of
the hidden anger, of which he had a lot, but we also feel the presence and generosity of
spirit that he had towards all of us, and he helped several of us and changed our lives.’”
The social and cultural divide is great in America, and, as the class struggle
intensifies, it is only becoming greater.
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The New York Times' 1619 Project A Racialist Falsification of American and World History

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THE NEW YORK TIMES’

Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, David North

World Socialist Web Site Pamphlet

Published by World Socialist Web Site

Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections?�������������������������������35

The attacks on Green Book and the racialist

The Cotton Pickers, 1864, by Winslow Homer

Slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement

These economic changes are gradual, imperceptible, but they have an

The victory of the American

8. The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 19.

motivated union soldiers by James McPherson; on Reconstruction by Eric Foner; on

American capitalism took hundreds of thousands of Negroes from the South,

This same capitalism took tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of

As late as 1910, nearly 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the former slave

[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the

10. Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?” accessed on 09/03/2019 at https://www.marxists.org/

A Slave Auction in the South, Harpers Weekly

Whether the means involved disenfranchising poor whites, keeping them

The dictatorship of the slave oligarchy

[E]ssentially bands of slave- and property-holders who monitored both the

Under the direction of this oligarchic terror:

The emergence of white opposition to slavery in the 1850s

Rebel Deserters Coming Within Union Lines, Harpers Weekly (1864)

Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the myth of “white privilege”

The political and material roots of racist ideology

The lynching of Leo Frank, August 17, 1915

Tom Watson, as Woodward explains, became a vicious racist, rejoining the

Lincoln with McClellan and Union troops at Antietam, October 3, 1862

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book

Lest we be accused of exaggerating the pernicious assault on Green Book, it is

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Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections?��35