Bravo!
Gene Betit
Winchester
Sent from my iPad
> On Aug 20, 2019, at 9:30 AM, Steven T. Corneliussen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Professor Meyers, for bringing up the Times Magazine's 1619 Project, which begins by introducing Nikole Hannah-Jones's story of learning to share her dad's deep (a justified adjective), flag-waving patriotism. Please indulge my tossing in not just two cents' worth, but four or six or maybe eight, all of it involving Virginia history.
> In 1958, Granby Elementary in Norfolk stayed closed for two weeks, introducing me and my fellow fifth-graders to Massive Resistance. In fourth grade we had learned from one of those happy-slaves Virginia history textbooks about 1619 as the Red Letter Year: women, democracy and slavery. That was then.
> Now the Times says that the 1619 Project "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."
> It seems to me that observers are right who declare that in the long run, the country has no choice but finally to face brutal slavery truths forthrightly. But I also have to wonder if necessary understanding requires increased attention--including by the 1619 Project as it continues--to something inspiring: Black agency.
> That, plus my usual zeal for post-Army Fort Monroe (at Point Comfort), is why I submitted the following letter to the Times.
> For fact-checking, I embedded source links, which I can provide to others if asked offline. The most important link is this at-a-glance new illustration that summarizes how Virginia is handling Fort Monroe: http://cfmnp.org/images/Please_unify_split_national_monument.jpg
> Steve Corneliussen
> - - - - - -
> Here's the submitted letter:
> Revisiting Adam Goodheart's 2011 Times Magazine story "How Slavery Really Ended in America" could illuminate the 1619 Project's crucial truth that the enslaved, believing "fervently in the American creed," were among the country's most ardent freedom strivers.
>
> Goodheart's setting was Fort Monroe, Virginia. That's Point Comfort. Where slavery began, it also began to end.
> In Confederate Virginia, Union-held Fort Monroe saw what Edward L. Ayers called "the greatest moment in American history." Henry Louis Gates Jr. says self-emancipating slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend forced "the beginning of the end of slavery."
> Is Fort Monroe the preeminent landscape for celebrating the war's eventual half-million self-emancipators?
> When the Army left Fort Monroe in 2011, politicians contrived a limited national monument on parts of it, bifurcated for overdevelopment. Tidewater mayors and others have urged enlargement.
> But last year, without even mentioning the national monument, Virginia proclaimed a vision "to redevelop this historic property into a vibrant, mixed-use community."
> 1619 Project, you're needed in Virginia.
>
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