“I think the important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism,” said the historian Gordon Wood in an interview last year. “But it’s the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America. So this is what’s missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.”

Mr. Wood is one of the country’s leading experts on the colonial era, and he was referring to a collection of New York Times articles published last summer that examine the role of slavery in American history. The project posits that the country’s real founding occurred not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. The claim is that the Revolutionary War was fought primarily to preserve America’s “slavocracy,” and that the country has risen politically, economically and culturally only through the subjugation of blacks.

Since publication, both the Times and its staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s creator, have come under sharp criticism from prominent academics. Now entering the fray is Robert Woodson, a black conservative and longtime community activist in Washington. Last week Mr. Woodson held a press conference to announce his own “1776 Project,” which is intended to counter what he called the “anti-America propaganda” of the Times’s endeavor. What’s troubling about “1619” is that “it defines America as being incurably racist,” he said. It insists that “all white people are beneficiaries of privilege and . . . victimizers. And all blacks are victims.”

Ms. Hannah-Jones has dismissed her detractors as “old white male historians,” but Mr. Woodson doesn’t fit that bill. Nor do a good number of the scholars he recruited—Glenn Loury, Carol Swain, John McWhorter, Jason Hill and Wilfred Reilly—to write essays that provide an “aspirational and inspirational” counternarrative to the Times’s. The pieces will appear on the Washington Examiner’s website and at 1776unites.com.

Mr. Loury described the absurdity of demonizing Western civilization for an institution that predates it. “Slavery was a fact of human civilization since antiquity,” he said at the press conference. “Abolition is the new idea. And that is a Western idea not possible without the democratic institutions that were built in 1776.” And in her essay, Ms. Swain reminds us that no single group is blameless, a fact the “1619 Project” all but ignores. “Those who push white guilt and black victimhood ignore critical facts,” she writes. “One is that today’s white Americans are not responsible for the sins of generations ago. Second, slavery was an institution that blacks, Native Americans, and whites participated in as slaveholders. There’s plenty of guilt to go around there.”