Trump does not want federal funds to go to California schools if they teach 1619 Project

President Trump on Sunday expressed his opposition to California public schools teaching the 1619 Project. 

Responding to a post that claimed "California has implemented the 1619 project into the public schools," Trump declared, "Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!"

The New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project suggests viewing American history through a lens that focuses on the arrival of slaves in 1619.

"The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country," New York Times Magazine's Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein explained in 2019.

Silverstein wrote that in 1619 "a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin."

The project and the idea of it being used in education has proven quite polarizing with Republican Sen. Tom Cotton earlier this year introducing a bill seeking to prevent federal funds from going toward the teaching of the 1619 Project in schools. The bill would decrease a school's federal funding by an amount connected to the cost of teaching the 1619 Project.

New York Times Magazine's Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary related to the 1619 Project, has noted that 1619 Project curriculum is available for free from the Pulitzer Center.