The 1619 Project: another good start

The 1619 Project is the first sort of project I have heard of from a major newspaper aiming to reframe the history of the USA in the light of our use of slave labor to build our country. One early article in the series that caught my attention ends with the quote from the little known Urban Renewal movement of the 1930s through about the 50s, by James Baldwin: “urban renewal means Negro removal.” As I created tours to give in DC, I learned of the neighborhoods devastated by the urban renewal movement, but I never knew of the ways in which the Interstate system deliberately used the highway system to build roadblocks between white and non-white neighborhoods, which were then reinforced by both RedLining and the FHA mortgage loan system. All of this, based on a ship that arrived in colonial Virginia in August of 1619.

(First seen in this blog post: https://jilldennison.com/2020/06/12/its-time-to-end-the-civil-war/ …)