by Patrick Chura,
Ph.D Professor English Department University of Akron
In 1845, feminist author Margaret Fuller strongly criticized her country’s duplicity on the subject of race. Inspired by Frederick Douglass, she denounced preachers who called themselves Christians while commanding slaves to obey a gospel they would not allow them to read. “The world ought to get on a little faster than that,” Fuller wrote.
Fuller’s words would make a good reply to the 1776 Report, a 45-page conservative manifesto authored by Trump’s 1776 Commission and spitefully released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Its MAGA-driven claims, intended as a rebuke to the New York Times 1619 Project and created for the purpose of restoring “patriotic education,” are fundamentally partisan and dishonest.
Correcting the historical record seems necessary.
The report’s most appalling feature is its defense of the country’s founding on the basis of slavery. A central claim of the 18-member commission of Trump allies is that the American founders were not hypocrites when they extolled freedom and, in the same breath, encoded human bondage into our Constitution.
To exonerate the founders, the report recycles the legend that George Washington freed his slaves on his deathbed. Actually Washington’s will specified that his 123 slaves were to be freed upon his wife’s death, when they were no longer useful to her. American education would be served by teaching this key distinction, perhaps alongside the fact that our first president’s dentures were made from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.
Thomas Jefferson, as Trump’s Commission notes, often expressed repugnance toward slavery. Yet he fathered seven children with slave Sally Hemings in a relationship that began when she was fourteen. For centuries white historians denied the liaison and the 1776 Report ignores it, likely because it confirms what the MAGA faction denies: Jefferson publicly denounced the depravity of white men who raped slaves, but he was privately one of those men.
MAGA education would of course glorify the bold signature of John Hancock, dramatically inscribed on the Declaration of Independence. But there is another story worth telling about Hancock’s signature. Three years before he put his name to the words “all men are created equal,” Hancock joined a group of Boston officials to “examine” Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl who had shocked New England by publishing skillfully wrought poetry.
Because of Wheatley’s race, the legitimacy of her authorship was questioned. The Boston elite assembled to pose questions designed to verify her intelligence. After the examination, Hancock and 17 other white men concluded that she was “capable” and signed an attestation to that effect. With this (less famous) John Hancock signature, he affirmed Wheatley’s humanity in a way that also revealed how dark-skinned Americans were as a rule denied humanity. Hancock had required authentication, a weapon still used against people of color.
Wheatley had been torn from the arms of her West African father at the age of seven and put aboard a slave ship bound for Boston, where she was sold and named after the ship that carried her. She was a fast learner, and as the American Revolution approached she saw that the words and actions of freedom-loving colonials were diametrically opposed. In a letter she wrote to her friend Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian, she compared New Englanders to slave-driving Pharaohs and slyly mocked the patriots. She stated that their “Cry of Liberty” sounded strangely hollow beside their “exercise of oppressive Power” over people like her.
At one point the 1776 Report makes the bizarre claim that the reason the word “slavery” doesn’t appear in the Constitution is that the framers thought the practice so abhorrent that including it would pollute the document. It seems more likely that the “Founding Fathers” were simply aware of their hypocrisy. They knew what they were doing and left “slavery” out in an attempt to hide certain truths, partly from themselves. “The omitting of the Word,” wrote Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention delegate John Dickinson, was “an Endeavor to conceal a Principle of which we are ashamed.”
The 1776 Report was deleted from the White House website just hours after the Biden-Harris inauguration. But the lies of Trumpism are far from defeated. I hope future generations of students will study the full report in context, as a cultural artifact. It would be a poetic way to countermand the pathetic act of timing the release of this offensive document to undermine Martin Luther King Day. Let’s repurpose Trump’s propaganda as a warning that fascism can happen here, and that the long arc of history doesn’t automatically bend toward justice.
