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A Republican senator who said the United States relied on slavery has called the practice a “necessary evil.”
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton told the Arkansas Democratic Gazette on Sunday that slavery “was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the road to its final extinction.”
Cotton on Thursday introduced the American History Savings Act to stop a New York Times Slavery Education Initiative Receiving Federal Funds.
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He told the Democrat-Gazette that “the whole premise of the New York Times’ in fact, historically flawed Project 1619 … is that the United States is at the root, a country that is systematically racist to the core and irremediable “
“I reject that root and branch. The United States is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all humanity is created equal. We have always struggled to fulfill that promise, but no country has done more to fulfill it. ”
Unlike, The New York Times’ Project 1619 wants to put “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of our national narrative,” a statement said.
Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and 1619 Project contributor Nikole Hannah-Jones condemned Mr. Cotton’s comments on Sunday.
Imagine thinking that a non-divisive curriculum is one that tells black children that the buying and selling of their ancestors, the rape, torture, and forced labor of their ancestors for profit, was just a “necessary evil” for the creation of the “noblest / country the world has ever seen,” he wrote.
“So, was slavery fundamental to the Union in which it was built, or not? You heard it from Tom Cotton himself.
The senator, who defended his comments to the Democratic Gazette, said Ms. Hannah-Jones’s comments were “more lies from the discredited Project 1619.”
“Describing the ‘views of the Founders’ and how they put the evil institution on the path to extinction, a point frequently raised by Lincoln, does not endorse or justify slavery,” he added.
It comes after The times He apologized last month for publishing an op-ed in which Cotton asked United States President Donald Trump to “send troops” to end the Black Lives Matter protests.
The senator then charged The “surrender to the crowd wakes up nonsense” document after Tit admitted that his opinion piece did not meet his own editorial standards.
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