ILHS Opposes Budget Reductions for Iowa Public Educational Institutions Using the 1619 Project and Similar Curriculum (February 2021)

[Update: Success! The law in question failed to advance in the legislature.]

The Iowa Labor History Society is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Iowa's labor and working-class history. As an organization of historians, archivists, librarians, educators, rank-and-file workers, and the general public, we strive to document Iowa workers' struggles and successes and to bring the best historical scholarship on the state's diverse working-class to the widest possible audience.

In accordance with that mission, we, the society's board of directors, register grave concern regarding a bill, House file 222, also known as "An act providing for the reduction of certain funding and budgets for public schools, community colleges, and regents institutions [sic] following the use of specified curriculum and including effective date and applicability provisions."

The bill in question would reduce the budgets of schools, community colleges, and Regents institutions that use "any United States history curriculum that in whole or in part is derived from a project by the New York Times, known as the '1619 Project', or any similarly developed curriculum." Such reductions or fines would undermine the quality of historical instruction in Iowa and promote an outdated and discriminatory interpretation of US and Iowa history.

The 1619 Project is a multi-media reporting and educational initiative of The New York Times Magazine. The project commemorates the four-hundredth anniversary of the year in which people aboard a Dutch ship sold twenty people of African descent to English colonists in Virginia, an act which, at least symbolically, marks the origins of the institution of slavery in what would become the United States. 

The project's creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is a journalist from Waterloo, Iowa.  With support from the New York Times, she developed it to draw public attention to the long legacy of slavery and white supremacy in the US and to acknowledge Black Americans' central role in realizing the nation's democratic ideals. The project—and her contributions to it—have earned numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.

To fine public school districts, colleges, and universities for teaching the project or, especially, "similar" materials, would force Iowa educators to contravene professional standards, as well as, in many cases, their conscience. We are raising and educating Iowa’s next generation of engaged citizens today, and teaching an outdated, censored, and narrow interpretation of history does not help our students or Iowans more generally; it undermines their capacity to be effective citizens.

Iowans of all backgrounds demand and deserve to be able to grapple with both the inspiring and troubling aspects of their past. As we know from the history of the US labor movement--which has, at times, both succumbed to and fought against the powerful influence of white supremacy in the US--it is certainly possible to take pride in one's institutions while also recommitting those institutions to higher standards and a more noble purpose. Any legislation or policy that would punish institutions that seek to take up this challenge should be rejected by all Iowans.

More broadly, we must resist interference with the curricular decisions and pedagogical practice of professional teachers. These are not political matters, subject to the will of politicians.  They go to the heart of freedom of inquiry and critical thinking, values and practices that we should be encouraging in our schools and institutions of higher education.  Teachers, students, and learners of all types must have the freedom to discuss, criticize, and openly consider a full range of sources and topics. 

To accomplish this goal, we must rely on teachers' professional training and standards of professional pedagogy.  To extend the long arm of government into the classroom and to interfere with those decisions—and especially to impose fines for not following government dictation in such matters--is not only misguided but unconscionable.  Anyone who claims to fear government overreach should be the first to criticize such a misguided piece of legislation.

The 1619 Project is based in and contributes to a growing recognition by professional historians that white supremacy was central to the growth and development of the US. This recognition is based in decades of scholarship in traditional sources like the writings of presidents and other "great men," but also in sources drawn from the lives of formerly enslaved and working-class people, including our own Iowa Labor History Oral Project.

The evidence revealed by this scholarship fills thousands of books, articles, archival boxes, and digital repositories. Even a cursory examination makes the connection between white supremacy and US history unavoidable and undeniable. Such connections reveal the ways in which the enslavement of people of African descent not only formed the foundations of many US social, political, and economic institutions but also established a long-lasting, flexible, and expansive culture of white supremacy that went well beyond slavery.

Consider just the following examples (some of which reflect the project's emphasis and approach as well as others that demonstrate how the theme of white supremacy's centrality can extend well beyond it):

·       White colonial officials' use of the law to stigmatize Blackness and to lock Black people into inherited, lifetime servitude in Virginia as early as the mid-1600s

·       White people's use of violence, removal, reservation, and assimilation policies against Indigenous peoples

·       The 1790 US Naturalization Act, which reserved citizenship to "free white" people (the act by which European immigrants to Iowa would become naturalized US citizens before the Civil War)

·       The 1804 Black Code for the District of Louisiana (which included most of the Louisiana Territory, including what would become Iowa), in accordance with which "negroes and mulattos" were excluded from serving as witnesses (except in federal cases, and then only against other Black people), traveling without a pass, and possessing weapons and ammunition

·       Explicit racial restrictions on voting rights in twenty-five of thirty-one states (including Iowa) by 1855

·       Whites' use of violence and terror to control and maximize profits from the lives and labors of enslaved peoples that fueled the growth of capitalism throughout the US

·       Whites' use of lynching and other forms of violence against Black and other people of color, sometimes as forms of public spectacle that included the distribution of postcards and other memorabilia (including in Iowa)

·       US employers' common tactic of using the idea and experience of racial difference to foment divisions between workers, especially in the context of union organizing or strike actions

·       White southerners' use of literacy tests, poll taxes, and other changes to registration and electoral laws to disfranchise the overwhelming majority of Black people (and some whites) in the region between the 1880s and the 1910s.  And, in our own time, the subtler but no less effective means used to suppress the votes of people of color in states throughout the country

·       The series of federal immigration acts following World War I that heavily restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (among other places) on the basis that such immigrants were insufficiently white and presented a racial, cultural, and political danger to the "Nordic" or "Anglo-Saxon" US

·       The racialization of people of Mexican descent, such that, in certain contexts, they were subjected to Jim or "Juan" Crow laws and practices

·       The persistence and spread of anti-Black segregation by various means throughout most of the United States (including Iowa) after the Civil War, resulting in Black people struggling to find equal access to housing, employment, education, healthcare, public accommodations, and social services and supports well into the twentieth century and serving as the basis for well-documented, systemic forms of racial exclusion, discrimination, and exploitation into the present

Although historians continue to research and reinterpret every point in this list, each of these points represents well-established and commonplace aspects of historical education in the US. The 1619 Project, therefore, far from lying outside the mainstream of historical scholarship, rests upon and responds to decades of the best research and scholarly debate.

Even the project's critics from within the historical profession—while they might take issue with particular arguments or examples—overwhelmingly affirm the centrality of white supremacy to US history. Or, to put it another way, the 1619 Project is not some foreign or narrowly ideological piece of propaganda, cobbled together from rumor, speculation, or some imagined party line. Instead, it is a thoroughly researched and well-regarded piece of historical scholarship developed by someone educated in our Iowa schools and shaped by the best of our Iowa values.

Moreover, to the extent that white supremacy has become less dominant in US life over the last four hundred years, we must seek explanations for that process in the actions of people—particularly those Black, Indigenous, and people of color who have been at the forefront of anti-racist struggles—not the allegedly timeless and unchanging character of American institutions. For example, as the 1619 Project suggests, if we are to explain how a nation so deeply influenced by white supremacy from the outset might go on to elect a Black president, we should start by identifying and celebrating the generations of Black people who fought and struggled to make the US "a more perfect Union."

Instead of censoring the 1619 Project or similar historical scholarship, we should be celebrating the project's Iowa roots as well as the ways in which it represents a move towards making the best scholarship on Iowa and US history easier to access. The project's groundbreaking work was achieved in part by its willingness to set aside complicated jargon and the barriers of scholarly books and journals to find a format that could make our nation’s history easier to understand, learn, and appreciate. All people have the right to a multi-faceted and critical history of their nation. We should celebrate not censor that history. If we, as Iowans, have that right, then our rights we should maintain.