Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is facing intense backlash on social media for comments in a newspaper article over the weekend in which he stated that slavery was a “necessary evil” for America’s Founding Fathers.
Cotton, who spoke to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for the story that was published Sunday, was voicing his opposition to U.S. schools teaching the 1619 Project, an educational initiative started last year by The New York Times as a way to highlight the story of slavery, which has been mostly left out of American history books.
The 1619 curriculum is being pushed for elementary and secondary schools. Cotton has introduced a bill to prevent federal funds and professional development grants from being given to schools that teach it.
Last week, Cotton called the project “a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.”
Then on Sunday he was quoted in the Democrat-Gazette, saying: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the founding fathers said, it 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 course to its ultimate extinction.”
On social media, Cotton was peppered with criticism for the statement.
“If chattel slavery — heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit — were a ‘necessary evil’ as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end,” tweeted Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who launched the 1619 Project in 2019.
Cotton, who is up for reelection this year, defended himself in a series of tweets, saying he did not endorse the phrase “necessary evil,” but said he was only highlighting the viewpoint of the Founding Fathers. In his response, Cotton also falsely claimed that the 1619 Project was “debunked.”
“This is the definition of fake news,” Cotton wrote on Twitter, responding to a steady stream of critics. “I said that *the Founders viewed slavery as a necessary evil*.”
CNN’s report on the matter found no record of the Founding Fathers ever using the phrase “necessary evil” to describe or defend slavery in the United States.
Hannah-Jones followed up again with Cotton on Twitter, saying: “You said, quote: ‘As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.’ That ‘as’ denotes agreement.”
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