#1619issue

Sharing this because I’ve been seeing this around other social media, but not around tumblr as much. The 1619 Project that details and preserves the history of black Americans in the United States. If you are a reader and wanting something to do for Black History Month, this offers a great opportunity to learn and familiarize yourself with black history.

Here is a short description: 

this is a very informative read. if you can handle reading on horrors including slavery, human rights violations, and american capitalism right now, i encourage you to do so. this journalist-historian is spilling the tea on where our horrifying capitalist situation comes from.

please read the following list before you click the link!!!

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Today’s racial wealth gap is perhaps the most glaring legacy of American slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed. The fate suffered by Elmore Bolling and his family was not unique to them, or to Jim Crow Alabama. It was part of a much broader social and political campaign. When legal slavery ended in 1865, there was great hope for formerly enslaved people. Between 1865 and 1870, the Reconstruction Amendments established birthright citizenship — making all black people citizens and granting them equal protection under the law — and gave black men the right to vote. There was also the promise of compensation. In January 1865, Gen. William Sherman issued an order reallocating hundreds of thousands of acres of white-owned land along the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina for settlement by black families in 40-acre plots. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank was formed to help four million formerly enslaved people gain financial freedom.

When Lincoln was assassinated, Vice President Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Sherman’s order by pardoning white plantation owners and returning to them the land on which 40,000 or so black families had settled. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men,” Johnson declared in 1866. The Freedmen’s Bureau, always meant to be temporary, was dismantled in 1872. More than 60,000 black people deposited more than $1 million into the Freedman’s Savings Bank, but its all-white trustees began issuing speculative loans to white investors and corporations, and when it failed in 1874, many black depositors lost much of their savings.