Loudness 9
Founding ideals were false
A magazine essay. Then a K-12 curriculum. The fact-checker was on the cutting-room floor.
Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project, August 2019: “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.” The Pulitzer Center turned the issue into a free K-12 curriculum. By May 2020 it was claiming 4,500 classrooms. The lead essay won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
This card files that sentence. It does not file “slavery was a footnote.”
What did have a receipt:
- Leslie M. Harris, the historian the Times asked to fact-check, wrote in Politico that she “vigorously disputed” the claim the patriots fought the Revolution “in large part to preserve slavery.” The paper ran it anyway. She listened, she said, “in stunned silence” as Hannah-Jones repeated it on air.
- The same essay tells students one “critical reason” the colonists declared independence was “to protect the institution of slavery.” Harris: protection of slavery “was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.” The Revolutionary War, she wrote, became a “primary disrupter” of slavery in the North.
- The Times later issued a clarification on the Revolution passage. The classroom PDF kept travelling. The slogan on the cover did not change: the founding ideals were false.
Grammar: were false. Logic: a fact-checker is not a decoration. Rhetoric: 1619 as founding.