The New York Times Magazine 47Covid infections and deaths made painfully apparent the ongoing inequalities
that the project had highlighted. Then, in May, a Minneapolis police offi cer
murdered George Floyd, and decades of pent-up frustration erupted in
what is believed to be the largest protest movement in American history.
In demonstrations around the country, we saw the language and ideas of
the 1619 Project on cardboard signs amid huge crowds of mostly peaceful
protesters gathering in cities and small towns.
It was around this time that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced
a bill called the Saving American History Act, which would ‘‘prohibit federal
funds from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in
elementary schools and secondary schools, and for other purposes.’’ Cotton,
who just weeks earlier published a column in The New York Times’s Opinion
section calling for federal troops to subdue demonstrations, stated that the
project ‘‘threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles
on which it was founded.’’ (The ‘‘curriculum’’ Cotton’s legislation referred to
was a set of educational materials put together not by The Times but by the
Pulitzer Center, a nonprofi t organization that supports global journalism
and, in certain instances, helps teachers bring that work into classrooms.
Since 2007, the Pulitzer Center, which has
no relationship to the Pulitzer Prizes, has
created lesson plans around dozens of
works of journalism, including three
diff erent projects from The Times Mag-
azine. To date, thousands of educators in
all 50 states have made use of the Pulitzer
Center’s educational materials based on
the 1619 Project to supplement — not
replace — their standard social studies
and history curriculums.)
Cotton’s bill did not move forward, but
it inspired many similar eff orts, perhaps
most prominently the 1776 Commission,
an advisory committee formed by Presi-
dent Donald Trump to respond to the 1619
Project and other attempts to advance
a more complicated narrative of the
American past. Referring to an academic
framework that seeks to locate the ways
racism aff ects the law and other institu-
tions, Trump said, ‘‘Critical race theory,
the 1619 Project and the crusade against
American history is toxic propaganda,
ideological poison that, if not removed,
will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us
together.’’ Instead, Trump’s commission
would promote ‘‘patriotic education’’
focused on ‘‘the legacy of 1776.’’ This never
got very far. The committee’s members
issued a report on Jan. 18, just weeks after
the failed insurrection in Trump’s name
at the U.S. Capitol, but it was widely crit-
icized by historians, and one of Joe Biden’s
fi rst acts as president was to disband the
1776 Commission altogether.
This barely mattered. In the United
States, the real decisions over education
are left to local governments and state
legislatures, and the Republican Party has
been steadily gaining control of legisla-
tures in the last decade. Today the party
holds full power in 30 state houses, and as
the 2021 sessions got underway, Repub-
lican lawmakers from South Carolina to
Idaho proposed laws echoing the language and intent of Cotton’s bill and
Trump’s commission. By the end of the summer, 27 states had introduced
strikingly similar versions of a ‘‘divisive concepts’’ bill, which swirled together
misrepresentations of critical race theory and the 1619 Project with extreme
examples of the diversity training that had proliferated since the previous
summer. The list of these divisive concepts, which the laws would prohibit
from being discussed in classrooms, included such ideas as ‘‘one race, ethnic
group or sex is inherently morally or intellectually superior to another race,
ethnic group or sex’’ and ‘‘an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race,
ethnicity or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed by other mem-
bers of the same race, ethnic group or sex,’’ as Arizona House Bill 2898 put
it. To be clear, these notions aren’t found in the 1619 Project or in any but the
most fringe writings by adherents of critical race theory, but the legislation
aimed at something broader. ‘‘The clear goal of these eff orts is to suppress
teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United
States,’’ the A.H.A. and three other associations declared in a statement in
June. ‘‘But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an educated pub-
lic.’’ Eventually, more than 150 professional organizations would sign thisIllustration by Derek Brahney
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