Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian who teaches at Boston College. She writes an informative blog called “Letters from an American.” This one appeared recently.

She writes:

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after an actor had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own plan. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857, this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so and Congress could not stop them. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so, the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, and the Loving v Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

It’s a funny thing to write about the Fourteenth Amendment in the twenty-first century. I am a scholar of Reconstruction, and for me the Fourteenth Amendment conjures up images of late-1860s Washington, D.C., a place still plagued by malaria carried on mosquitoes from the Washington City Canal, where generals and congressmen worried about how to protect the Black men who had died in extraordinary numbers to defend the government while an accidental president pardoned Confederate generals and plotted to destroy the national system Abraham Lincoln had created.

It should feel very distant. And yet, while a bipartisan group of senators rejected Bork’s nomination in 1987, in 2021 the Supreme Court is dominated by originalists, and the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment seem terribly current.

Of course, if today’s U.S. Supreme Court were truly originalist, Justice Amy Coney Barrett would not be eligible to serve on the Court, women would not have the right to vote, blacks would not be considered citizens, and so on.

When I grew up in Houston, Texas, I attended segregated public schools. Everything was segregated, including movie theaters, drinking foundations, churches, restaurants, public transit (the sign “colored” divided passengers, with blacks in the back of the bus; if there were more white passengers than black passengers, the sign was moved back and black passengers gave up their seats and stood), and everything else. Even newspaper ads were segregated, by both race and gender. Blacks entered white homes through the back door. Blacks were expected to step off the sidewalk and into the street when passing a white pedestrian.

In my high school American history class, we learned almost nothing about black history. Our textbooks recognized George Washington Carver and his discovery of the many uses of peanuts. That was about it. In eleventh-grade U.S. history, the textbook taught the now-discredited Dunning theory of the Reconstruction Era (William Archibald Dunning was a Columbia University history professor who taught the white Southern view of the period); we were taught that the South after the Civil War was overrun by corrupt black politicians who bankrupted their states and by white carpetbaggers who helped the corrupt blacks. We now know that the Dunning version of history was untrue, and that the post-Reconstruction governments in the Southern states produced a remarkable period of progressive legislation.

In college in the late 1950s, there were no courses in black history. Not until I was in graduate school did I study black history in depth and learn about the systematically vicious, brutal, and demeaning treatment of black Americans by white Americans. I knew it from life experience, but at the same time I did not know it in full, as Hannah-Jones presents it in The 1619 Project.

Her essay in the collection is a powerful and persuasive history of black people in the United States.

History has often been taught simply as facts to be memorized. But history taught well involves not only facts, but discussion about controversies. Historians agree about basic facts, but not about causes and consequences. Historians disagree. Events seldom if ever have a single cause. And they usually have multiple consequences. Students must learn about the disagreements and think critically about what they learned. They may come down on one side or the other, but they should learn to respect those who disagree with them.

Was the American Revolution intended to preserve slavery, as Hannah-Jones asserts? Most seismic events have multiple causes, and their participants have different motives. Some American rebels fought to escape British colonialism; some fought to avoid British taxation; and some fought to stop the abolitionist fervor from reaching their plantations. Is racism part of the DNA of America? If so, the situation is hopeless and the prospects for change are out of reach. Thoughtful people look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions about their meaning. That’s what makes the study of history interesting.

In the current controversy surrounding The 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones offers a pessimistic view of the treatment of black people in America. Her critics think she is too pessimistic. They don’t differ about facts, but about interpretations of facts. I usually find myself responding to questions of interpretation by saying, “It depends.”

Some white Americans say that the proof of black progress is that the nation elected and re-elected a black President; that some blacks (like Oprah and other stars of the entertainment and sports industries) are fabulously successful; that affirmative action has allowed blacks to enter elite universities and executive suites; and that Congress has passed multiple civil rights laws to forbid racial discrimination.

Other white Americans recognize that institutional and personal racism still exists, despite laws on the books, despite the success of Obama and Oprah. They know the statistics about black poverty, segregated schools, maternal health, access to medical care, and other indicators of disadvantage. They see black neighborhoods that are blighted, racially segregated, and lack decent public services. They know the incarceration rates for people of color. They know that state legislatures are passing laws to make it harder for them to vote. They see how few blacks make it into the executive suites.

If I were black, I would admire The 1619 Project and share it with my family and friends. I would be impressed by Nikole Hannah-Jones’ courage, audacity, and scholarship. I would feel that at long last the story of black people was told.

Should The 1619 Project be used in high schools when teaching American history? Absolutely yes. It should be taught alongside the criticisms of its ideas. It is a wonderful teaching tool. It is thought-provoking. It demonstrates how history can challenge conventional thinking. It shows black people as agents, not simply as victims. It shows a seamy and vicious side of American life that was real and important to know. Students should not be ignorant of black history. By using this material, students will learn that our understanding of history is constantly evolving and that the subject is a fascinating battleground of ideas.

Whether they agree with critic Sean Wilentz of Princeton or Hannah-Jones, they will be far better educated about American history by reading their disagreements. We must confront and debate our history and move beyond efforts to indoctrinate students with a whitewashing of the past.