The 1619 Project, launched by writers with The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, was a long-form journalism endeavor which aimed to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative. The results first appeared in print in August 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia. These were also the first Africans in mainland British America, though Africans had been in other parts of North America since the 1500s.
The project sparked criticism and debate among prominent historians and political commentators, who expressed "strong reservations" about the project and requested factual corrections, accusing the project's creators of putting ideology before historical understanding. The 1620 Project was formed to provide counter viewpoints. President Donald Trump proposed that history in America should begin with 1776, when America declared itself independent of Great Britain, stating that prior to then we were just a part of a greater empire.
Any lover of history would know that the history of America goes back much farther than either of those dates.
When I lived in Massachusetts, I would often take a day trip somewhere beyond the Boston suburb in which I lived to explore the history, culture and beauty of the region. One of those trips took me to Salem, an old shipping town south of Boston. I visited House of the Seven Gables, the old port and all the sites associated with the witch trials. Sites familiar to anyone who watched a series of episodes from the old television series "Bewitched", or just anyone who has read the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. There is a lot of history in this old seaport town, but one incident in its past brings it to mind most often for its dark side.
But even in places like that, our knowledge of history can be shaded by our own experiences or prejudices.
Popular lore surrounding the Salem witch trials summons images of wrongly accused white women and girls bound to stakes and perched atop flaming pyres. But an accurate portrayal of United States history would look extremely different - and provide an ugly but all-too-familiar confirmation of what we know about the power of historical erasure.
So, let us talk about a part of our history almost no one knows. Of the approximately 25 women and girls convicted of witchcraft in the 13 colonies between 1648 and 1692, none met their end strapped to a stake; they were all hanged. And while it is true that women of this period were burned at the stake as a form of capital punishment, most of them were not white - they were black.
It is not easy to absorb these events. But we need to do so, for the sake of historical accuracy. To illuminate them is to shine a light not only on long-standing racial biases in American justice but also to show that bigotry has been present from the beginning.
In his diary entry on September 22, 1681, Increase Mather - father of the legendary clergyman Cotton Mather and later a president of Harvard College - wrote of “a negro woman who burnt 2 houses at Roxbury July 12.” The woman, Maria, described as a servant - often a euphemism for an enslaved person at the time - of Joshua Lambe, was convicted of arson for using a hot coal to set fire to the house of a local doctor and Lambe’s home.
As punishment, Mather wrote, “the negro woman was burned to death.” He went on to explain that she was the first woman to suffer this fate in New England.
Maria was also the first woman to receive such a sentence in the 13 colonies. And her brutal death would prove to be the start of a grim pattern in American justice.
Beginning with Maria’s execution and ending with the last known woman burned at the stake - which, according to the Espy File on United States executions from 1608 to 2002, was a black woman in North Carolina in 1805 - the overwhelming majority of women to face the fatal fires of justice, 87 percent, were black.
Convicted of either arson or murder, black women faced harsher sentences than did white women accused of the same crimes. White women were usually spared from the searing flames; if these women did receive capital sentences, they met their deaths dangling from a noose.
Maria’s case highlights other ominous legal legacies. Throughout much of the nation’s history, black women constituted the lion’s share of female death penalty cases, especially during and after the Civil War. Black women also have the dubious distinction of setting several historic capital punishment “firsts.”
Just as Maria was the first woman burned at the stake, the first women to be executed in New York and New Jersey were black. The youngest girl put to death via the electric chair was Virginia Christian, a 17-year-old African American, in 1912. Sentenced for killing her elderly white employer, the teenager could not be saved, even by the mass mobilization of black folks on her behalf.
What little we know about these cases foreshadows harmful stereotypes perpetuated about black women, particularly the notion that they were especially dangerous and homicidal. According to Mather, for instance, Maria was not just an arsonist but a killer. In one of the houses she set aflame, he wrote, “a child was burnt to death.” Yet court documents made no mention of any such victims.
In fairness to Mather, court records of the period are maddeningly sparse. In Maria’s case, missing is any mention of a motive, save that she lacked a fear of God and was instigated to wickedness “by the divil.” We also do not know Maria’s age or origins. Had she been born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony or imported from the Caribbean or the African continent? And there is no satisfactory explanation for why other black servants, cleared of wrongdoing, were nonetheless removed from the colony.
Maria’s case exists as an apt metaphor for the treatment of black women in the historical record, illustrating a dynamic as tragic as it is timeless. Back then, white people did not bother to document the lives of black women and rarely, with the exception of Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln's dressmaker, did they document their own lives. Today, as evidenced by aggressive efforts to restrict the teaching of the United States’ racial history, many white people want even the limited remnants buried.
If we are to effectively work toward equal justice in this country, we must know this history and understand its impact on black women’s lives. In the present, we cannot allow racist tyranny to silence the past. The testimonies exist. We must hear them.
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