Radically recasting America's formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times 1619 Project is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems.
That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the late 1960s. That catastrophically wrong turn the civil rights movement took spawned the warped worldview that would eventually dominate the study of race in the contemporary world of higher education, before spreading out into American political culture.
Until the middle 1960s, a very different set of perspectives dominated the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer vigorously opposed the racial status quo of the times, but they analyzed its nature largely within the parameters of traditional American cultural frameworks. Constitutional Republicanism and Protestant Christianity were central cultural systems for these critics. In short, these civil rights activists believed American culture and formative principles were sound and simply needed to be fully implemented to correct existing problems regarding race relations.
By the late 60's, newer, younger, extreme voices had arisen in the world of black civil rights. The now largely forgotten book Black Power (1967) distilled this new radical perspective. Cowritten by a young radical political scientist, Charles Hamilton, and one of the most controversial figures in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael, the book's title quickly became the term representing the entirety of the radical racial identitarian movement that took off in the 60s and 70s.
Hamilton and Carmichael argued that the situation for blacks as a whole had markedly deteriorated, and that prospects going forward would be dismal unless blacks as a group took up a revolutionary perspective.
