Pulitzer Prize to New York Times Essay Falsely Claiming American Revolution Was Fought to Preserve Slavery

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery.

The essay, titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” launched the Times‘ controversial 1619 project.

The essay incorrectly claimed that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 (signing began weeks later, on August 2).

However, the far more egregious error was Hannah-Jones’s claim about the cause for which the Revolution was fought. She wrote: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

That passage, which appeared in the original text, has since been updated to include the word “some” (emphasis added): “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim. One of them, Northwestern University Professor Leslie Harris, was enthusiastic about the 1619 Project, but furious about the inaccurate claim. Harris recalled in Politico:

Rubio says US has no plan to use force in Venezuela — but warns ‘imminent threat’ could change that

FBI agents search election hub in Fulton County, Georgia

Op-Ed: How Pro-Life Republican Leaders Are Delaying the End of Abortion

Watch: As Chants Ring Out About Lynching Kristi Noem, Clueless Lib Protesters Realize to Their Horror Who They’re in Bed With

Anheuser-Busch praised for patriotic Budweiser Super Bowl ad after Bud Light controversy

Child Sex Abuse Material Made with AI Surges to Shocking New Levels

Tom Homan Issues Statement After Meeting with Tim Walz and Jacob Frey

Ilhan Omar backed by House Republicans after Minnesota town hall attack

Vandals hit Yosemite National Park with graffiti on boulder, more

Privacy concerns, discrimination, doctor pushback: the compliance traps looming behind sex-separated sports

Trump threatens attack on Iran worse than ‘Midnight Hammer’ with military buildup in the region

90-year-old woman who wandered outside during winter storm among 10 dead in New York City

Trump endorses Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s son-in-law for Congress

Xi Jinping’s purge of generals sets grim tone for annual Communist Party meetings

Democrats request money while consoling after Minneapolis deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good

On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.

…

I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.

…

Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.

The current version of Hannah-Jones’s essay preserves other controversial statements, such as the claim that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” which repeats (almost verbatim) a claim then-President Barack Obama made in 2015 to National Public Radio that racism is “still part of our DNA.”