UCSC event looks deeper into the history behind ‘The 1619 Project’

There are years that stick in the memory of anyone who has studied American history, whether in the classroom or outside it: 1776 obviously, 1861 and the beginning of the Civil War, 1945 with the end of World War II and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. But for the most part, 1619 has not been one of those dates … that is, until about four and a half years ago. 

That’s when The New York Times unveiled its ambitious long-form journalism effort called “The 1619 Project.” The project pinpointed the summer of 1619 as the moment when a ship carrying enslaved Africans landed for the first time in the English colonies of North America. Now “1619” is becoming a kind of shorthand to talk about the long shadow of the colonial slave trade, antebellum chattel slavery in the American South, Jim Crow segregation after the Civil War, and the ever-present aspects of racism in American culture today.

Still, not everyone is up on what The New York Times is publishing. And, in that spirit, UC Santa Cruz history professor Greg O’Malley is leading a public event to flesh out the history of that date. On Thursday, Feb. 1, O’Malley and two other historians will convene at the Music Center Recital Hall on the UCSC campus for a deep-dive lecture and presentation called “What Actually Happened in 1619: The Origins of Slavery in North America.”

O’Malley — who will be joined by Elise Mitchell, a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, and Kevin Dawson, an associate professor of history at UC Merced — said that The New York Times project is a worthy addition to a broader understanding of American history and the central role slavery plays in that history. The Feb. 1 event, he said, is more about filling in the blank spots of the Times project.

“It’s more of an attempt to answer some questions that I think ‘The 1619 Project’ leaves unanswered,” he said. “‘The 1619 Project’ is most interested in the long-term legacies of slavery in the Americas. It uses the 400th anniversary of 1619 as a jumping-off point or a hook to bring people into a conversation about the more recent past.”

“The 1619 Project” is a multimedia presentation, led by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, that features long-form essays and photography projects that first appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2019. It eventually spawned a podcast, a television series and an educational curriculum.

On Feb. 1 at UCSC, the assembled historians will not focus per se primarily on the project itself, but more zero in on what the world of 1619 was like. “Since I’m a historian of slavery and the slave trade in colonial America, I’m just trying to pull the conversation back to actual 1619,” O’Malley said. “What actually happened then? Why was that considered the start? What was going on in the wider historical moment of 1619?”

O’Malley will speak about the voyage of that first slave ship to arrive in the English colonies of North America, (perhaps ominously) called the White Lion, a pirated vessel that landed in Virginia in the summer of 1619, a full year before the much more well-known landing of the pilgrim settlers on the Mayflower in New England. O’Malley stressed that the slave trade of kidnapped and stolen Africans preceded the landing of the White Lion by many years, and that 1619 is “the story of the spread of slavery to North America rather than the invention of a new institution.”

Princeton’s Elise Mitchell will be on hand to discuss the role of disease in the slave trade and what conditions were like on the slave ships. And Kevin Dawson from UC Merced will contribute his insights on the cultural contributions of those first enslaved Africans in the English colonies. “He’s got a particular interest in African and African American maritime culture,” said O’Malley, “which I think will be interesting to Santa Cruz audiences, because he has some interesting information on the origins of surfing.”

When it was released in the summer of 2019, “The 1619 Project” ignited a controversy. Some historians criticized the project’s scholarship. More prominently, many Republicans began to use it as a cudgel in the culture wars, and some GOP lawmakers even moved to ban “The 1619 Project” from appearing in schools. The project also appeared less than a year before the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning on race in America that that event sparked. 

O’Malley said next week’s presentation is less about The New York Times and its work, and more about what was happening in 1619: “There is some controversy among historians over ‘The 1619 Project.’ Some of the critics would argue that it overemphasizes the importance of slavery to certain aspects of American history, that it wants to view everything in American history through this lens of slavery. But the basic question of 1619, when the first Africans arrived in the Americas, or how that went down, that’s not really controversial at all among historians. It’s pretty well documented.” 

“What Actually Happened in 1619: The Origins of Slavery in North America” takes place Thursday, Feb. 1, at 6:30 p.m. at the Music Center Recital Hall on the campus of UC Santa Cruz. The event is free, but registration is required. 

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