Inside the Room Where They Tried to Erase 1619

I was in the Roosevelt Room the day they decided to declare war on history.

It was a humid August afternoon in 2020, and most of us in the Comms team had just come from a COVID briefing that had, as usual, gone off-script. Jared was pacing by the fireplace, half-scrolling through Twitter, half-listening. Stephen Miller was already seated, flipping through printed pages of what looked like an op-ed marked in red Sharpie. The president hadn’t arrived yet, which meant the tension could still pass as boredom.

Then someone—I think it was Johnny, one of the advance guys—tossed a copy of The New York Times Magazine onto the conference table. The cover read: “The 1619 Project.”

“Who reads this?” he asked no one in particular. “They’re saying America started with slavery. That we weren’t even a country until then.”

Stephen didn’t even look up. “That’s because for them, America is always a mistake.”

That’s how it started. With a magazine and a room full of men who believed they were defenders of a myth, not just a nation.

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At the time, I didn’t know much about The 1619 Project. I’d seen it trending. I knew it was making the rounds in school districts. I knew people were talking about it like it was gospel—or blasphemy.

But that day, it became something more. It became an enemy.

The president walked in 10 minutes late, fresh from a Fox interview. He had that swagger he used when the cameras were off but the performance never really stopped.

“They’re teaching kids to hate America,” he said, like it was already a policy memo. “We’re not letting that happen. Not on my watch.”

He pointed at Miller. “Fix this. Put together a commission or whatever. Tell the truth. The real truth. We need something like… I don’t know… call it the 1776 Commission.”

He liked that. 1776. The founding. The fireworks. It sounded like the Fourth of July and Lee Greenwood in one breath.

No one questioned it. That wasn’t how things worked.

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By September, the plan was moving fast. The executive order had already been drafted. On Constitution Day, we rolled out the first public remarks at the National Archives. It was packaged as a defense of heritage. A stand against “left-wing indoctrination.” The president called The 1619 Project “ideological poison.” We workshopped that line the night before.

The speech played well with the base. Tucker and Ingraham ran segments praising “patriotic education.” But behind closed doors, it was messier. Most of the people chosen for the 1776 Commission weren’t historians. Some had barely read the Project. They were chosen because they would say the right things.

I remember sitting in a follow-up meeting with two of the appointees—retired academics, both white, both visibly uncomfortable when asked if slavery should be taught as “foundational” or “exceptional.”

“I just think we need balance,” one of them said.

Balance. That word was everywhere. It meant, “Don’t make white kids feel bad.” It meant, “Reframe the past as a series of unfortunate but necessary events.” It meant, “Forget.”

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I started reading The 1619 Project in secret.

I told myself it was just for research. For context. But the deeper I got, the harder it was to dismiss.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ opening essay hit like a gut punch: the idea that Black Americans have been the strongest proponents of democracy because they’ve been denied it. That slavery wasn’t a footnote—it was the blueprint. The economy, the politics, the culture—it all traced back to that original sin.

I thought about the history classes I’d taken. How they skipped from Plymouth Rock to the Founding Fathers like nothing happened in between. How Reconstruction was barely a paragraph. How we were told slavery ended and then—voilà—civil rights.

This wasn’t “anti-American.” It was just fuller.

But in the West Wing, admitting that would’ve made me suspect.

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January 6th happened just weeks before the 1776 Report was released.

Most of us were still dazed, pretending everything was normal while the world watched footage of men in buffalo horns storming the Capitol. We were burned out, humiliated, and scrambling to protect our reputations.

Two days before Biden’s inauguration, the president demanded the report be released publicly. No peer review. No academic vetting. Just slap it online and call it done.

I saw the document before it went live.

It praised the Founding Fathers like saints. Compared civil rights activism to totalitarianism. Claimed identity politics was a threat to national unity. Slavery was mentioned as an unfortunate “challenge,” not a system. There was no mention of Indigenous genocide. No real engagement with race beyond a few vague nods to equality.

We had sanitized the past to make it palatable.

I stood in front of the White House printer, holding that report in my hand, and for the first time in four years, I felt ashamed.

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The backlash came quickly.

Historians tore it apart. Educators called it propaganda. Civil rights groups blasted it as racist revisionism.

Biden abolished the commission on day one.

But the damage had already taken root. State legislatures started introducing bills to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts.” Anything that could cause “discomfort” about race or history was under fire. Teachers were silenced. Books pulled. Libraries boxed up anything too honest.

We had given permission—for suppression.

The 1619 Project became the scapegoat. It was easier to target a book than a system.

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I left D.C. a few months later. I moved west, took a low-profile comms job at a nonprofit, and tried not to think about the years I spent crafting talking points for an administration that saw truth as negotiable.

But I kept a copy of The 1619 Project on my bookshelf. The original magazine. Folded, underlined, coffee-stained.

Sometimes I reread the passage where Hannah-Jones writes:

“Black Americans fought to make democracy real. The United States is a nation forged in the crucible of Black resistance.”

And I remember the president calling it poison. I remember us nodding.

And I wonder—how many times in history did people in rooms like that one decide what parts of the story got told?

And who got left out.

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This isn’t a confession. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m just telling you what I saw.

I was there when they tried to erase 1619.

I watched them twist the past to protect their present.

I helped write the pages they hoped you’d never read.

And I hope now—you read them anyway.