General Oliver Otis Howard Was A White Union General And Head Of The Freedmen's Bureau

WSWS  |  New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Instead, Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.

Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.

According to a university press release, the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing.”

The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring racial conflict between blacks and whites.

Hannah-Jones’ lead essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than a garden-variety racist. 

The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site, in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by Hannah-Jones.

Her other writings have descended into outright racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.