GOP legislators’ resolution on African-American history falters in Arkansas Senate

A resolution “To Commemorate American History” filed in the Arkansas Senate to recognize the “accomplishments of African-Americans throughout America’s history” includes a refutation of the “1619 Project” and a narrative that the Republican Party has been the champion of civil rights for African-Americans.

After a heated discussion in the State Senate on Tuesday (Feb. 9), the resolution failed on a 4-22 vote.

The 1619 Project has been controversial in recent years because it provides alternate perspectives on slavery in the United States. Arkansas legislators have pushed back against such alternate views and curriculum addressing systemic racial injustice. Rep. Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, filed HB 1218 and HB 1231 which seek to restrict teaching of social justice and diversity, and the 1619 Project.

“The 1619 Project, again, is a thesis in search of evidence. It is not one that should be taught as fact, it’s not one that should be taught as history, it is a narrative,” Lowery explained during a recent meeting with the legislative black caucus. “The writer says that all of American history is based on white oppression… It doesn’t take much to look around the room and to identify, in an uncomfortable way – in an almost child-abuse way – which students are the oppressors.”

HB 1231 failed in the House Education Committee Tuesday, and Lowery said he had no plans to bring it back. He also said he would not run HB 1218.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 6 (SCR6) is an 11-page filing that begins by noting that African Americans have worked to “shape America into the exceptional nation of unprecedented opportunity and achievement it has become over the centuries;” and that “many important and indisputable facts from American history have been underemphasized and overlooked but are worth presenting.”

Sens. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch, and Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, and Rep. Mary Bentley, R-Perryville, are sponsors of the bill. No African-American legislators are co-sponsors. A concurrent resolution is non-binding. If SCR6 were to pass the Senate, it would then be transferred to the House of Representatives for consideration. It does not require the governor’s signature or become law.

SCR6 also notes that “the story of African-American heroes over the past three hundred and fifty (350) years needs desperately to be told and known by all Americans today but is often ignored or rewritten” and that “too many today overlook or ignore America’s ongoing positive record on race and slavery.”

In a direct counter to the 1619 Project, the resolution notes that “the first African slaves in a North American English colony arrived in Virginia in 1619 but became indentured servants instead of remaining slaves, earning their freedom, with the state giving them their own land after a set number of years; and

WHEREAS, the first documented occasion of legalized chattel slavery in the English colonies of America did not occur until 1654 in Virginia, when free African-American Anthony Johnson sued in court and won the right to own another African-American for life.”

Following are some of the paragraphs in the resolution that seeks to note the Republican Party’s role in U.S. civil rights.

• “WHEREAS, when African-Americans in southern states received civil rights, including the right to vote, they promptly elected state Republican legislatures across the South, which moved quickly to protect voting rights for African-Americans, prohibit segregation, and open public education, public transportation, state police, schools, and other institutions to African-Americans.”

• “(In 1876 Democrats regained control of the United States House of Representatives, blocked further civil rights progress, and began repealing existing civil rights laws so that it would be another eighty-nine (89) years before the next federal civil rights law was passed.”

• “Democrats had it completely within their power to pass those landmark civil rights bills but did not, and Republicans overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with eighty percent (80%) of Republicans voting for that bill, a percentage of support almost twenty (20) percentage points higher than that of the Democrats.”

Sen. Sullivan explained to Talk Business & Politics that he filed the resolution because it is Black History Month and “Black history is American history.”

“There’s a lot of things in this resolution that I didn’t know. I can’t blame it on my teachers,” Sullivan said.

He wants to send the resolution to schools and community as an educational document. However, no African-American lawmakers signed on to the bill despite Sullivan’s efforts to include them, he said. In the Senate debate on Tuesday, several lawmakers questioned the veracity of the resolution and the lack of diversity in the bill’s construction.

Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, who taught American history and was the first Black student to integrate Hendrix College, spoke against the bill. She said she taught African-American history as an educator for decades.

“There are some parts of it that are questionable and don’t do black history justice,” Chesterfield said.

Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, said it was “probably the worst resolution” he’s ever seen. He chastised the resolution as being “partisan” and “petty.”

“I see something that is a compete abuse of what we’re supposed to be doing,” Hendren said.

Daniel Maher, professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and former director of the Fort Smith Multicultural Center, said the resolution misses key points about the history of slavery in America.

“While it is commendable that Representative Sullivan acknowledges the importance of recognizing African American history in SCR6, it is done so in a disingenuous, back-handed fashion. For example, to speak of a ‘dual track for African Americans’ being able to live ‘with much slavery and oppression in the South and much freedom and opportunity in the North’ makes it sound as if African Americans could make a choice in the matter, and erases the fact that there was slavery and racial oppression in the North,” Maher said.

Maher also said the resolution authors fail to note the shifts between political parties.

“The main premise of SCR6 is that white Republicans did the most to ‘help’ African Americans. The authors of the bill seem unaware that the platforms of the Republican and Democrat parties have fluctuated over the centuries. Bragging on what the Republicans did in the 19th century is not equivalent to Republican positions on race today. Fundamentally, declaring credit for what white people have done to lift up African Americans detracts from what should be the focus in Black History Month,” he noted.