All of us must be sensitive to the past ills of slavery,  but not just slavery. Genocide, religious wars, tortures, and savagery have been the way of man at his worst forever. The 1619 project is calculated to ignore everything good about America’s founding and instead focus on 1619.  A few facts:

1. Slavery was practiced by every aboriginal tribe on both the North and South American continents for centuries before Columbus arrived. Therefore, slavery in the Americas dates back to prehistoric times, not 1619.

2. Slavery was practiced by all European, Asian, and African nations or tribes centuries before Columbus landed in the New World. Slavery  in the Old World dates back to prehistoric times.

3. The colonizing nations brought their institution of slavery with them to North America where the aboriginal tribes already practiced it. However, the vast majority of slaves went to the Carribean, not what would become the United States.

4. During The Enlightenment in Europe and North America, the morality of slavery began to be questioned by an ever increasing number of people. The Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson would have ended slavery in the United States. However absolute opposition to this by South Carolina and other southern states defeated this attempt as well as a later one at the Constitutional Convention. Nonetheless, almost all northern states had made slavery illegal by the early 1800s.

5. Slavery fell more and more into disrepute in the United States with every passing year. Finally, in 1860, in an attempt to maintain and expand slavery, democrats in the southern states tried to secede from the United States. In the resultant Civil War, approximately 360,000 anti slavery, U.S. military personnel (the vast majority of whom were white) died fighting and finally defeating the democrat pro slavery secessionist forces.

6. Post war, the north failed to enforce the necessary reconstruction laws in the former secessionist states thereby allowing southern democrats to enact and enforce various Jim Crow laws. Much of this problem came from the assassination of President Lincoln.. Black Americans were violently denied their rights as American citizens and thousands were murdered by southern democrats from 1870 until 1964. Then, in 1964, as a result of their own efforts and those of mostly white northern Republicans, the Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed, followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1965, ending Jim Crow.

7. Consequently, in 1965, Southern democrats changed their strategy. Using LBJ’s “Great Society” programs as a Trojan Horse, they destroyed the black American nuclear family, and created a new, nationwide welfare plantation system, that would, as LBJ himself said, “have those [n-words] voting democrat for the next two hundred years.”

8. Final Note: The United States ended slavery before aboriginal American tribes did, and long before most African nations or tribes. In fact, slavery is still practiced in some parts of Africa.