A proposal seeking to ban Arkansas schools from teaching the 1619 Project was rejected by a state legislative panel Tuesday, upholding an ongoing reexamination of American slave history by The New York Times.
The anti-1619 proposal was the latest of several attempts by Republican-controlled states to keep schools from using the educational curriculum that sprang from the project.
The voice vote failed on the same day that the state Senate rejected a resolution that claimed the country had an “ongoing positive record on race and slavery” and attacked Democrats for their record on civil rights issues.
»AJC IN DEPTH: The 1619 Project reopens book on slavery but not without controversy
Republican Rep. Mark Lowery, who proposed the ban, said the project portrays a misleading narrative of American history and cited some historians’ criticisms of parts of it.
“(Slavery) is an awful stain on our history and it should be discussed in our classrooms, but the 1619 Project is not the vehicle for that,” Lowery told the panel.
State Education Secretary Johnny Key also addressed the panel.
“This is something, as far as adoption of curriculum, that’s best left to the local elected boards and administrators and educators,” he said.
Lowery acknowledged he was unsure how the prohibition would be difficult to enforce. The bill called for reducing funding for schools that violate the ban in an amount equal to the cost associated with teaching the project.
The proposal is one of two bills Lowery has proposed limiting how race and slavery is taught. But Lowery indicated he’s likely to rework his other bill, which calls for banning courses that promote social justice for one racial group, to instead allow parents to choose whether their children can take those courses.
The 1619 Project started with an essay in The New York Times in August 2019 that brought renewed attention to a largely hidden history — the beginnings of American slavery more than 150 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The project was timed to the 400th anniversary of the first indentured servants from Africa arriving in the British colonies for the first time at Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown in 1619.
Four hundred years later, an ambitious and ever-expanding historical initiative called The 1619 Project is reexamining the early American experience through the lens of this period in an effort to reassess slavery’s lasting legacy and as a way to highlight Black history, which has been mostly left out of American history books.
The Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to develop 1619 Project lesson plans, said it’s heard from more than 3,800 K-12 teachers and nearly 1,000 college educators who planned to use them. Of those, only about two dozen were from Arkansas.
The 1619 Project was launched during the Trump presidency. At the time, conservatives around the country, including prominent executive branch officials and several Republican senators, eagerly condemned the project.
The effort to ban the 1619 Project in Arkansas drew opposition from teachers, civil rights leaders and the state’s top education official. Similar bans have been proposed in Mississippi and Iowa, and critics have called it an effort to whitewash crucial parts of the nation’s history, according to The Associated Press.
“What you’re doing is censoring and you’re taking away the ability of those who have been trained to stand before our students and teach and provide trained guidance in curriculum development,” Democratic Rep. Reginald Murdock said during a roughly two-hour hearing on the proposal.
The relevance of the initiative became more pronounced in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death — the horrors of the slave trade and the continued public visibility of its relics fueling widespread calls against systemic racism.
The 1619 Project is embarking on its third year at a pivotal moment of racial reckoning in America, with the aim of showing how institutional slavery and racism intertwined with American idealism from the very beginning, then slowly ingrained into the deeper context of the nation’s principles of freedom and liberty.
Information provided by The Associated Press was used to supplement this report.
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