wsws | Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project
Historian Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), spoke to the World Socialist Web Site’s Eric London on the historical falsifications involved in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”
The 1619 Project, launched by the Times in August, presents
American history in a purely racial lens and blames all “white people”
for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.
Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and impoverished people toward slavery. Her book The Free State of Jones
studied efforts by anti-slavery and anti-confederate militia leader
Newton Knight, who abandoned the Confederate army and led an armed
insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was
adapted for the big screen in Gary Ross’s 2016 film Free State of Jones.
