The Architecture of Erasure

A civil service exam score of 94.7. A house in LeDroit Park. A president's written promise of justice.

By 1915, all of it was gone.

When Woodrow Wilson entered the White House in 1913, James Cornelius Saunders was living proof that merit could triumph over prejudice. A Treasury Department clerk who had earned his position through one of the highest exam scores in Washington, he owned his home, sent his son to Howard University, and believed in the American promise.

Within two years, wooden screens surrounded his desk. His salary was cut in half. His house was seized. His son never finished college. James spent the next twenty-eight years mopping floors in the building where he once balanced the nation's books.

He was not alone. Thousands of Black federal employees faced the same systematic destruction—not through violence or mobs, but through policy, procedure, and paperwork. Through architecture.

A century later, historian Marcus Webb opens a box his dying grandmother placed in his hands. Inside: a brass key, a broken-promise letter, a photograph of a house that no longer exists. As he traces the documentary evidence of his great-great-grandfather's destruction, Marcus discovers that the architecture of erasure was designed to leave no fingerprints—yet somehow, the evidence survived.

The Architecture of Erasure moves between the federal offices of 1913 and the archives of 2020, weaving a dual narrative of destruction and recovery. It is a novel about what gets built when merit systems are dismantled, what gets lost when homes are foreclosed, and what gets found when one generation finally reads the letters another risked everything to preserve.

This is the story Woodrow Wilson's legacy tried to bury.