Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed a bill that would cut federal funding to any public school that includes the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” as part of its curriculum. The initiative is named after the year that enslaved Africans were first brought to North America. In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Senator Cotton refers to slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

In response, 1619 Project writer Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, “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 Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.”