Capital Research Center’s New Short Film Sheds Light on Pulitzer Prize–Winning ‘1619 Project’

The once-esteemed Pulitzer Prize Committee on Monday awarded New York Times’ investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the “1619 Project,” a prize for Commentary despite growing criticism over the revisionist-history polemic that seeks to cast the founding of America as an effort born of racism and slavery.

Capital Research Center, concerned for some time about the push to have the “1619 Project” included in school curricula, has responded with a short film produced by its Dangerous Documentaries media arm as part of the “Architects of Woke” series entitled, “The 1619 Project’s Fake History.” It calls out the egregious misrepresentation of the nation’s founding; which incidentally has been noticed by highly regarded historians such as James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, and prominent African-Americans such as Bob Woodson of the Woodson Center.

Key points include:

• This new history rests on a radical revision of America’s birth, including the claim that the Founders declared independence from Britain to protect slavery. That last claim, included in Hannah-James’ prize-winning essay, was based on teachings by revisionist historians like Gerald Horne, a professor who has a disturbing affinity for communist leaders and murderous dictators.
• There was nothing like a universal acceptance of slavery among the founders. Many, in fact, vocally called the practice abhorrent and barbaric.
• The Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619, the year for which Hannah-Jones’ project is named, were not in fact slaves but indentured servants, who traded several years of their labor in exchange for the cost of their passage to America, where they believed they would have a better life. They were outnumbered in Virginia at the time by white indentured servants.
• This kind of revisionist history is actually detrimental to the African American community because, as Bob Woodson notes, “nothing is more lethal to a people than to convey to them that it’s impossible for them to be agents of their own uplift.”

To learn more about the 1619 Project, check out the following links:

• InfluenceWatch
• The New York Times’ 1619 Project
• Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Educational Programming
• Historian Nell Irvin Painter on the indentured servants, not slaves, who arrived in 1619
• Criticism by historian Gordon Wood
• Historians’ letter to the editor & The New York Times

And you can find the film at our other social media sites:

• CRC Twitter 
• Dangerous Documentaries Twitter
• CRC Facebook
• Dangerous Documentaries Facebook
• Dangerous Documentaries Website

The Architects of Woke series takes aim at far-left thinkers and activists responsible for the spread of identity politics from college campuses to society at large. It is hosted and directed by filmmaker Rob Montz, who is the co-founder and CEO of Good Kid Productions. His online documentary work has attracted millions of views and coverage in major outlets, including The Economist, USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Adam Carolla Podcast.

His 2017 documentary “Silence U. PT 2: What Has Yale Become?,” published on We the Internet TV, won the 2018 Reason Video Prize. You can view previous episodes of the Architects of Woke at the following links:

• Judith Butler’s War on Science
• Slavoj Žižek & the Romance of Revolutionary Terror
• Chapo Trap House & the Marxist Vanguards for Alienated Millennials
• Stokely Carmichael & Racism Without Racists
• Howard Zinn, Hollywood, & the Fairy Tale of American Evil 

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