Students thoughts on GJR 1857 Project

These thoughts were written by our 2020 summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

Students were tasked with reading, “The 1857 Project: Extracting the poison of racism from America’s Soul” by William H. Freivogel, the first essay in the Gateway Journalism Review and sharing some of their initial impressions.

Myla C. – I found this article very interesting. It opened my eyes to racial issues and events that I was not aware of. Unfortunately, it highlights a continuous cycle of racism in the St. Louis area. However, I hope that one day we will break the cycle and stop repeating history. Also, it was very interesting to read Freivogel’s opinion on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project. He disagreed with her statement that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” I did not expect Freivogel to address Hannah-Jones’s mistake.

Gabe L. – If this article reminds us of anything, it’s quite simply that history is not linear. We like to believe that the whole of history is moving only forward, that all progress is good progress, and that while scattered with moments of catastrophe or evil, those moments are the exception, never the rule. Then you sit down to actually go through everything that’s happened and history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes. We touched on some of the details in school, the Dred Scott case, the Jefferson Bank protests, the riots in East St. Louis, or the time the KKK adopted a stretch of I-55 just south of the city and the state renamed it Rosa Parks Highway. But those details didn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a constant cycle and web of lives and histories coming together all the time. And it’ll keep producing events like this unless we reexamine and restructure the entire thing.

Sophie L. – The introduction to the 1857 project highlights the overt way racism infects our education system. All of the events listed in the timeline are events that happened in St. Louis, a place most of us have grown up in for our entire lives. And yet, so many of us know so little of our own history. Why? Probably because teaching a national narrative on racism allows for the myth that racism is, more or less solved, and there are only a few racist individuals left, scattered across society, that make life difficult for Black Americans. Looking at a national history allows for readers to avoid having to look at their own history and the concrete ways the system of racism is being perpetrated in their own lives. The 1857 Project is the particulars of the 1619 project, it is the concrete example of our history, our city, and our current reality. There is a reason the education system deliberately mis-teaches the history of the United States and ignores the history of Black Americans: because until we fully know and understand our history, we cannot make the forward progress required for meaningful change.

Martriana M. – I really enjoyed reading this article. I believe it had a good balance of information and emotion in the way they explained the racial history of St. Louis and Illinois. A lot of what was written in was new to me, making me realize that I didn’t know as much about the city I grew up in as I thought I had, and it was good to finally know these things. I liked that the article included timelines to help the reader get a sense as to how long these racial issues have been going on and have been continuing to happen as well.

Stephanie N. – This article made a lot of great points. The one that resonated with me the most was when the author says, “Forgetting is the national pastime in the United States.” We see this in every aspect of politics especially in the news. Stories will run nonstop for about a week and then we move onto something else. With Trump, he’ll do something stupid and people will be mad until the next stupid thing he does. I think that’s pretty dangerous in that the American public is not good at being committed to issues. A lot of the issues we face are deeply ingrained in the system and are going to take more than a week of attention to be resolved.

Emily S. – This article highlighted how much of St. Louis history I am unaware of. Although I live out in St. Charles County, I’ve always identified with the general location of St. Louis, and it was eye opening to me that I didn’t know about so much racial history within my own home city. Seeing the timeline of the major racial incidents in the past 50 years shocked me – not because I was surprised that racism existed in St. Louis, but because there were so many incidents that I hadn’t even heard of. I also thought this essay did a great job of tying St. Louis’ racist past with the issues Black St. Louisians face today and how those evolved.

Riley W. – I think that this article did a lot of what has been said and explored in the other things we’ve read but a little more targeted.  Because Missouri was never completely apart of the confederacy because they fought with the north, we often like to think of ourselves as the good guys. This article reveals that that has never really been true and cannot be said about really anywhere in America and is something that we need to acknowledge and address.

Ethan W. – I found this essay very interesting. As the essay points out, we all know about the Dred Scott decision and the murder of Michael Brown, and while these events are incredibly important, there is so much more that has happened that reveals the institutionalized racism in St. Louis. I didn’t know about a lot of the things mentioned in the essay, such as the veiled prophet ball and the Kirkwood City Hall massacre. I am excited to continue reading and to learn more about both the history and problems in St. Louis.