Trump’s 1776 Report was not the only response to the 1619 Project; pragmatism is the focus of my 1776 Unites essay

I have an extra reason to be pleased that President Joe Biden has revoked the Trump administration’s 1776 Report, released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and aimed to promote “patriotic” history education in schools.

I happen to have an essay in the Woodson Center’s older and unrelated but similarly purposed and privately funded 1776 Unites report, and some people already were getting the two mixed up.

Like Team Trump’s project, 1776 Unites is a conservative response to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sparked both praise and controversy with its recentering of American history as beginning not with the Declaration of Independence but with the arrival of the first slaves.

In response to the criticism, the 1619 Project’s principal reporter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, changed a line in her Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay from calling slavery a “primary motivation of colonists” in the revolt to “some of the colonists.”

But there were other objections, most vociferously from the academic and political right to the Times putting the great American shame of slavery on center stage. One of the more rational criticisms came from Robert Woodson, founder of the Woodson Center and MacArthur “genius grant” winner whose work promoting “self-help” solutions in low-income neighborhoods and public housing developments I have been writing about since the early 1980s.

Knowing Woodson, who cares more about solutions than ideology (“I don’t care about what’s right or what’s left,” I recall him telling me in the ’80s, “as much as I care about what works”), I was not surprised that he was outraged by the victimization focus of the 1619 Project’s history.

Although I am a known liberal, I share his quest for solutions that work in fighting poverty and closing education gaps (“Call me a radical pragmatist,” he proudly declared in a Skype interview for this column), so I was honored to be invited to contribute an essay.

Unlike Trump’s project, Woodson aimed less to criticize or rebut the Times than to offer a history that the Times largely left out: The untold and underappreciated stories of resilience and success that African Americans have achieved despite the obstacles and degradation of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

“We agree (with the Times) that slavery has been understated and undertaught,” Woodson told me in our Skype interview. “We agree that the role of racism needs to be examined in the full light of day. We need to look at any element that stands in the way of people’s progress. Any element.

“The difference (in our approach) is, they place all the emphasis on race — that white racism is in the nation’s very DNA. If racism is enshrined in your soul, your DNA? You can’t change people. That’s a cynical analysis that leaves you fighting, not for justice but for political positioning.”

I, too, prefer to consider every tool we have at our disposal. That’s why I chose to write about how patriotism is not for whites only, even though some of my brethren and sisters too often think it is.

I wrote about how, for all the moral shortcomings of our nation’s slavery-tolerating founders like Thomas Jefferson, they also provided the rhetorical and constitutional tools that leaders like the Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall used effectively to fight for our liberation.

I recall how poverty became unfortunately “colorized” in media and our national conversation during the turbulent 1960s, leaving many struggling white folks feeling embittered that advances for us feel like setbacks for them.

As President Lyndon Johnson said with memorable candor, according to his then-aide Bill Moyers: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

LBJ was a realistic politician, realistic enough to enact the boldest civil rights legislation in a century by recognizing the very politics of resentment and divisiveness that haunt our politics today. We Americans need to know our history, not just to relive its horrors but to build a better future.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)