Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 17: James Oakes on the 1619 Project (4)-Was anti-slavery humanitarian enough?

James Oakes in his 2021 article on The 1619 Project talks about a trend he perceives as denigrating or dismissing the pre-Civil War anti-slavery movement among whites as cynical and insincere because it proceeded from economic and social motives that appear less than noble.

That criticism of the anti-slavery movement certainly contains a lot of truth. The popularity among white abolitionists of the colonization movement, the idea of relocating all Black Americans to Africa, was as racist as it was impractical. Virtually no Black abolitionist activists supported that scheme. The most important group devoted specifically to that project was the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816 and had run out of steam by 1834.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/confederate-heritage-month-april-221