Cotton v. The 1619 Project by Lynne Thompson
Associate editor Olivia Kingery on today’s bonus hybrid essay: Blending prose, poetry, history, and personal reflection, "Cotton vs. 1619 Project" is an experience not only important, but necessary.
Cotton vs. The 1619 Project
I
The 1619 Project is an…initiative….[that] aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative (New York Times, August 2019) because “as long as you’re south of the Canadian border, you’re in the South…” (Malcolm X).
II
In 2011, Arkansas’ Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s website read, in part: “Washington [D.C.] should not dictate choices to either parents or local school systems…Federal education policy should encourage communities to develop their own standards…choice, competition, and freedom will provide needed reforms…” and
III
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the founding fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built…” (Tom Cotton, July 2020) but
IV
On July 23, 2020, Cotton introduced legislation which reads, in part: … “The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded…The Federal Government has a strong interest in promoting an accurate account of the Nation’s history…no Federal funds shall be used by any elementary school or secondary school to teach the 1619 initiative..[or] to support the teaching of the 1619 Project initiative in the public schools…”
V
Cotton prefers not to teach children
about the evils that built the Union: the Middle Passage—dehydration
dysentery, scurvy, profitability
the ballast block
the branding iron
the Antelope, 283 Africans aboard
the Creole, 128 Africans aboard
the Guerrero, 561 Africans aboard
the Isabella, 150 Africans aboard
the
& the
too innumerable to name
a 15% mortality rate—except those
who boarded the Zong where
130 Africans were killed before landfall &
then
the burning of Rosewood
the Elaine Massacre
the bombing of Tulsa
&
&
& VI
“Incidents of lynching, an extra-legal form of group violence, were prevalent in [the early 20th century]; one scholar estimated that, during its peak in [Arkansas] at least 318 documented lynchings occurred, 231 victims of which were black. Perhaps Arkansas’ most notorious lynching is that of John Carter, accused of assaulting a local white woman and her daughter. He was found…eventually…hanged from a telephone pole, and shot. Later, his body was set ablaze and dragged through the streets of Little Rock to the corner of Ninth and Broadway—the heart of the city’s black community.” (Encyclopedia of Arkansas) and
VII
“Southern trees…blood on leaves…blood at the root…bulging eyes and twisted mouth…”
VIII
John Wadlington was lynched
for being a Republican, 1872 &
George Bullitt was lynched
after being accused of outrageous conduct toward a white family, 1878 &
Mrs. Turner Graham was lynched for an unknown cause or accusation, 1885 &
much, much later
Tamir Rice & Walter Scott & Alton Sterling &
Freddie Gray & Breonna Taylor & George Floyd &
then & then again &
IX
In the early 20th century, my daddy emigrated to America from a sugar plantation, Lesser Antilles, West Indies, despite the rebellions: the Atlanta Massacre of 1906, blacks hung from lamp posts, shot, beaten, stabbed; the Johnson-Jeffries riots set off because Jack Johnson defeated a great white hope; the Chester riot incited by whites opposed to the Great Migration post-World War I but my daddy came anyway.
In the mid-20th century, my brothers, aged 15 and 17, left Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City and when they’d eaten all of the sandwiches mother could prepare, they had to rely on a fearless black floor-sweeper to pass them scraps of day-old bread from the back door of a “white’s-only” restaurant.
In 1968, Year of Dr. King’s Assassination, my then-three-year-old niece, washing her hands at her pre-school’s communal sink, was asked by a little white boy “is your butt black too?”
X
But did you know Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament component of the light bulb?
And did you know Charles Drew invented bloodmobiles in the years when blood donations were segregated by race?
Or did you know Mary Davidson, disabled, multiple sclerosis, invented toilet tissue holders?
Did you…do you know, even now…do you…? No?….then
XII
“[If] you wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down” (Toni Morrison).
Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award in 2008. She’s also the author of Start With A Small Guitar (2013) and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards, among them an Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poets 2020. New work is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, december, and Black Warrior Review. On February 24, 2021, Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Lynne Thompson Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles.
