by TREVON AUSTIN & BILL VAN AUKEN
On Wednesday, December 11, Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the New York Times ’ “1619 Project,” delivered a speech in Houston to inaugurate the Emancipation Park Conservancy’s lecture series depicting the “Black Experience.”
The appearance was part of a nationwide lecture tour in which Hannah-Jones is promoting the 1619 Project’s “reframing” of the history of the United States as an unending racial struggle of whites against African Americans. The American Revolution of 1775 to 1783 and the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, according to Hannah-Jones, were sham events, unrelated to the struggle for equality and the eventual destruction of slavery. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were racist hypocrites dedicated to the defense of white supremacy.
Hannah-Jones’ appearance in Texas was sponsored by the Houston-based Shell Oil Company. This is the US subsidiary of the oil and gas corporate giant Royal Dutch Shell, which is confronting international public outrage over its involvement in massive human rights abuses in the African country of Nigeria. The focus of protests has been Shell’s collaboration with the Nigerian government in the suppression of the Ogoni ethnic group. The company currently faces multiple court cases over its complicity in the murder of thousands, including the Nigerian dictatorship’s hanging in 1995 of the well-known Ogoni writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
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