Politics: Trump Targets a Slavery Removal from the National Museum of African-American History and Culture
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Trump sets sights on national African American history museum
President Trump targets museums he said push divisive ideology. Activists and historians say he's trying to erase the nation's tarnished history.
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Black Americans Fight to Stop Federal Agencies’ Quiet Deletion of Their History
Agencies are scrambling to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Black Americans Fight to Stop Federal Agencies’ Quiet Deletion of Their History
Agencies are scrambling to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion.By Brandon Tensley , CapitalBPublishedApril 13, 2025
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Originally published by Capital B.
Alan Spears remembers visiting Gettysburg National Military Park with his parents in the 1970s. They wanted something educational, free, and fun to do with their only son, and the park was an obvious choice, given Spears’ interests — his favorite television show as a child was The Rat Patrol, about soldiers during World War II.
It was there, at the Pennsylvania park, a roughly 1½-hour drive from Washington, D.C., that Spears became infatuated with history: the cannons everywhere, the statues of soldiers holding guns.
“I fell in love with war the way a kid might on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam or at Harpers Ferry. But I also began to learn about what that conflict — the Civil War — actually meant, and I started to see it through adult eyes,” said the 60-year-old D.C. native, who went on to study U.S. history at Clark University and Howard University. “My parents and the National Park Service are to blame — they hooked me solidly into U.S. history.”
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It’s because of these experiences that Spears, the senior director of cultural resources in the National Parks Conservation Association’s government affairs department, feels a combination of hurt, anger, and concern over attempts to scrub Black history from federal websites.
In recent weeks, as federal agencies scramble to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion and other supposedly harmful subjects, they have sought to censor information on their websites about the long and ongoing struggle for Black equality, or erase Black stories entirely. This pattern, according to historians, whitewashes the past — and it should encourage people to push back.
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“When you start to fiddle around with history, that isn’t what makes a country great,” Spears told Capital B. “It makes us weaker. And it makes us meaner, because we’re going to be much less informed about the broad sweep of U.S. history and all the people who have contributed to making this country a good country.”
Controversy erupted earlier this week after reports surfaced that the National Park Service had rewritten a webpage about the Underground Railroad to de-emphasize the consequential role that Harriet Tubman played in Black resistance to enslavement. After public outcry, the agency restored Tubman’s photograph and a quote mentioning human bondage.
Trump in March signed an order maintaining that the Smithsonian Institution is being influenced by a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order specifically describes the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which Trump once praised, as being “oppressive,” and it empowers Vice President JD Vance to review all Smithsonian programs and centers and remove what the president calls “improper ideology from such properties.”
(Kevin Young, the museum’s director, also has stepped down. A museum spokesperson has said that Young’s departure is “totally unrelated” to Trump’s order.)
Earlier in March, information about the baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s U.S. Army career — he was drafted during World War II — was briefly pulled from the U.S. Department of Defense website. The URL for the page temporarily included the tag “dei.” A profile of Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, who served in the Vietnam War and became the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, also was removed and then reinstated.
And that same month, a demolition crew began razing Black Lives Matter Plaza in D.C. in response to Republican threats to district funding. The mural was created after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and had proclaimed, in vivid yellow paint, that “Black Lives Matter.”
Such purging has only bolstered some Black Americans’ determination to preserve their history. Sisters Jo and Joy Banner co-founded the Descendants Project, a nonprofit focused on supporting formerly enslaved communities on the Gulf Coast. Preservationists, the Banners live in Wallace, Louisiana, a town that was settled by Black soldiers who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War.
The sisters can trace their family roots back to those who had been enslaved on local plantations, and hope to reclaim the narrative power behind their ancestors’ story by restoring properties in the area.
“The first time [enslaved Africans] were brought here was a ripping away of their history, a taking away of their names and their culture,” Jo Banner told Capital B.
In October, the National Park Service published the results of a multiyear study of an 11-mile stretch of the Great River Road along the west bank of the Mississippi River in west St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. The report noted the “exceptional integrity” of the landscape, which creates “a sense of the feeling of living and working in the plantation system in the American South.”
Despite these findings, the agency in February withdrew the area from consideration for National Historic Landmark designation — a decision many see as part of a pattern of erasure.
“If we want our own liberation — if we want to own telling our true history — we have to own it,” Jo Banner said, referring to her and her sister’s attempts to elevate Black history in their community by buying a plantation and creating a museum.
“We Can’t Wait for Everything to Disappear”
Keisha Blain, a professor of history and Africana studies at Brown University, said that the recent changes are part of a longer trend.“Conservative politicians have been waging a war against the teaching of Black history for years — Florida is just one example — and so it’s not all that surprising that DEI is being dismantled in various ways,” she told Capital B.
In 2023, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gained national notoriety for leading the charge against Advanced Placement African American Studies. His administration blocked the course from being taught in the state’s public schools, insisting that it would make white students feel guilty about the past.
“Avoiding the difficult aspects of history may bring comfort to some, but it leads to ill-informed public policy, and we’re seeing this unfold in real time,” Blain said.
“One of the reasons that DEI is under attack is that far too many Americans are ignorant of history,” she added, noting that if you understand the country’s legacy of exclusion — the fact that President Woodrow Wilson swiftly segregated the federal workforce in 1913, for instance — then you understand why it’s imperative to have programs that can ensure equal access and opportunity.
Spears underscored that people must let the administration know that they’re keeping a close watch — that they care about history and want to learn about the good and the bad. Without such vigilance, he argued, we get things such as the Lost Cause, the mythology claiming that the Civil War wasn’t fueled by the issue of human bondage.
“We must be active and engaged. We can’t wait for everything to disappear,” Spears said. “When we see the first inkling that someone is trying to change a website or the physical layout of a city, we must let folks know that we don’t believe that the erasure of people and history from our national narrative is a good idea.”
Capital B staff writer Adam Mahoney contributed to this report.
Historians see Trump attacks on the ‘Black Smithsonian’ as an effort to sanitize racism
“It seems like we’re headed in the direction where there’s even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall is seen on March 28, 2025 in Washington. | Mark Schiefelbein/AP
By Associated Press
03/30/2025 07:49 AM EDT
ATLANTA — President Donald Trump’s order accusing the Smithsonian Institution of not reflecting American history notes correctly that the country’s Founding Fathers declared that “all men are created equal.”
But it doesn’t mention that the founders enshrined slavery into the U.S. Constitution and declared enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of the Census.
Civil rights advocates, historians and Black political leaders sharply rebuked Trump on Friday for his order, entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” They argued that his executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution is his administration’s latest move to downplay how race, racism and Black Americans themselves have shaped the nation’s story.
“It seems like we’re headed in the direction where there’s even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed, or that Jim Crow laws and segregation and racial violence against Black communities, Black families, Black individuals even occurred,” said historian Clarissa Myrick-Harris, a professor at Morehouse College, the historically Black campus in Atlanta.
The Thursday executive order cites the National Museum of African American History and Culture by name and argues that the Smithsonian as a whole is engaging in a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.”
Instead of celebrating an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” the order argues that a “corrosive … divisive, race-centered ideology” has “reconstructed” the nation “as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
It empowers Vice President JD Vance to review all properties, programs and presentations to prohibit programs that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”
Trump also ordered Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to determine if any monuments since January 2020 “have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history” or “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures.” Trump has long criticized the removal of Confederate monuments, a movement that gained steam after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Critics argued the order is the latest move by the Trump administration to quash recognition of Black Americans’ contributions to the nation and to gloss over the legal, political, social and economic obstacles they have faced.
Trump’s approach is “a literal attack on Black America itself,” Ibram X. Kendi, the race historian and bestselling author, said. “The Black Smithsonian, as it is affectionately called, is indeed one of the heartbeats of Black America,” Kendi argued, and “also one of the heartbeats” of the nation at large.
Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., suggested that Trump wants to distort the national narrative to racist ends.
“We do not run from or erase our history simply because we don’t like it,” she said in a statement. “We embrace the history of our country – the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
The African American museum, one of 21 distinct Smithsonian entities, opened along the National Mall in 2016, the last year that President Barack Obama held office as the nation’s first Black chief executive. The museum chronicles chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation and its lingering effects, but also highlights the determination, successes and contributions of individual Black Americans and Black institutions throughout U.S. history.
People wait in line to enter the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultural on the National Mall in 2017. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Former NAACP President Ben Jealous, who now leads the Sierra Club, said museums that focus on specific minority or marginalized groups — enslaved persons and their descendants, women, Native Americans — are necessary because historical narratives from previous generations misrepresented those individuals or overlooked them altogether.
“Attempts to tell the general history of the country always omit too much ... and the place that we’ve come to by having these museums is so we can, in total, do a better job of telling the complete story of this country,” he said.
And, indeed, Trump sounded more like Jealous when he visited the African American museum in 2017, at the outset of his first term, and declared it a national gem.
“I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage, especially when it comes to faith, culture and the unbreakable American spirit,” Trump said following a tour that included Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, both of whom are Black.
“I know President Obama was here for the museum’s opening last fall,” Trump continued. “I’m honored to be the second sitting president to visit this great museum.”
Trump won his comeback White House bid with a notable uptick in support from non-white voters, especially among younger Black and Hispanic men.
He ratcheted up attacks during his campaign on what he labeled “woke” culture and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, not just in government but the private sector. He also used racist and sexist tropes to attack Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold national office, and regularly accused her and other liberals of “hating our country.”
Since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump has banned diversity initiatives across the federal government. The administration has launched investigations of colleges — public and private — that it accuses of discriminating against white and Asian students with race-conscious admissions programs intended to address historic inequities in access for Black students.
The Defense Department, at one point, temporarily removed training videos recognizing the Tuskegee Airmen and an online biography of Jackie Robinson. In February, Trump fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., a champion of racial diversity in the military, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brown, in the wake of Floyd’s killing, had spoken publicly about his experiences as a Black man, and was only the second Black general to serve as chairman.
The administration has fired diversity officers across government, curtailed some agencies’ celebrations of Black History Month, and terminated grants and contracts for projects ranging from planting trees in disadvantaged communities to studying achievement gaps in American schools.
Civil rights advocates and historians expressed concern about a chilling effect across other institutions that study Black history.
Kendi noted that many museums and educational centers across the country — such as San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Alabama, and the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina — exist with little to no federal or other governmental funding sources. Some already are struggling to keep their doors open.
“To me, that’s part of the plan, to starve these institutions that are already starving of resources so that the only institutions that are telling America’s history are actually only telling political propaganda,” Kendi said.
Erasing History: Trump Admin Set to Target Museum of African American History?; Jay Jones Raises $925K+ for AG Race
➡️ There are 25 days until early voting starts on May 2 for the June 17 primary
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Erasing History: Trump Admin Set to Target Museum of African American History?; Jay Jones Raises $925K+ for AG Race
Apr 07, 2025
There are 25 days until early voting starts on May 2 for the June 17 primary There are 71 days until the June 17, 2025 primary in Virginia There are 575 days until the November 3, 2026 midterm elections There are 1,310 days until November 7, 2028️ Trump Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to the Administration
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Trump Targets Removing History Related to Slavery from National Museum of African-American History and Culture
The museum’s slavery facts and substantiating artifacts of the 250 years of the enslavement of Africans in America, curated by historians, are the bull’s-eye for the Trump administration.
By April Ryan for Black Press USA. “Black people are not going to stand for this,” says Nikole Hannah Jones, the author of the 1619 Project. She is responding to reports that President Trump is targeting the slavery section of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
The museum’s slavery facts and substantiating artifacts of the 250 years of the enslavement of Africans in America, curated by historians, are the bull’s-eye for the Trump administration.
“I think that this is a sign of a deep sickness to think that you could go to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and feel the need to erase how Black people got here,” emphasized Jones, who added, “To erase or minimize the slavery and freedom part of that story is to create a fantasy of how we got here. We literally would not be in the United States without slavery.”
According to sources, Smithsonian officials are secretly strategizing to stave off presidential actions for Republican support to preserve the history. Smithsonian officials hope once they have secured Republican support, they can present the attempt to save the artifacts and museum integrity to President Trump. In its lower portion, the museum takes tourists on a historic timeline journey from American slavery to Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement with the casket of Emmett Till, and simulations of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, among other noted moments in American history.
“We cannot be a free democratic society when you have the most powerful people in the world who will take control of a history museum and force them to tell a lie,” said a distraught Jones, who has been tracking the museum’s movements more closely since its director Kevin Young left his post last week after four years on the job. Over a million people visited the museum in 2022, making it the second-most toured Smithsonian Museum. Read entire at Black Press USA
Race for Attorney General: Jay Jones Raised Over $925,000 in Q1, Nearly $1.5 Million Cash On Hand for
The campaign of Jay Jones, who is running to be Virginia’s next Attorney General, announced this morning that that he “raised over $925,000 during the first quarter of 2025 and has built a war chest that boasts nearly $1.5 million cash on hand.”The Jones campaign says he now has the, “most cash on hand for any challenger running for Attorney General at this point in the cycle in Virginia history. This brings Jones’ total cycle raise to over $1.8 million since launching his campaign.”
"As Donald Trump and Elon Musk attack our wallets and our rights, Jason Miyares is carrying out their agenda in Virginia. But Virginians are stepping up to join our fight to stop them. With this record-breaking support, we're building the movement that will protect our families, defend our freedoms, and win,” Jones, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates who ran for Attorney General in 2021, said in his statement this morning.
Virginia Institutions Face Uncertainty as Trump Admin Suspends Museum and Library Agenc
Institute of Museum and Library Services, slated for shuttering by Trump administration, disbursed $6 million in grants to Virginia organizations in 2024 that funded educational programs and historical record digitization.By Nathaniel Cline for Virginia Mercury. FindItVirginia, a platform that provides free education resources and tools for children, parents, military veterans and English language learners, is one of several programs statewide whose funding could be gutted by the shuttering of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the latest in a series of moves by President Donald Trump’s administration to slash “wasteful” spending.
The platform has helped connect military veterans to employment resources, provided tutoring services for children and tools to learn different languages, all for free — federal funding through IMLS offsets the costs of the $1.6 million system.
“All of these resources, which would ordinarily cost individual libraries or even individuals a lot of money if they wanted access, are shared here as a resource with all public libraries,” said Lisa Varga, executive director for the Virginia Library Association.
She added that the platform is also available to Virginia’s schools and is “an incredible asset, because there are so many schools, like rural schools, that don’t have the money for these databases.” IMLS grants make it possible for every student in the state to have access to programs and services like FindItVirginia, Varga said.Subscribe
Federal agencies in the crosshairs
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, is one of the several entities included for elimination in Trump’s March 14 executive order to cut government waste, along with the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and the Minority Business Development Agency. READ ENTIRE
Virginia institutions face uncertainty as Trump admin suspends museum and library agency • Virginia Mercury
FindItVirginia, a platform which provides free education resources and tools for children, parents, military veterans and English language learners, is one of several programs statewide whose funding could be gutted by the shuttering of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services...
virginiamercury.com
Virginia institutions face uncertainty as Trump admin suspends museum and library agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services, slated for shuttering by Trump administration, disbursed $6 million in grants to Virginia organizations in 2024 that funded educational programs and historical record digitization.
By:
The Children’s Museum of Richmond has been able to support children through an initiative called the Trailblazer Club to help prepare students for kindergarten. (Courtesy of Children’s Museum of Richmond)
FindItVirginia, a platform that provides free education resources and tools for children, parents, military veterans and English language learners, is one of several programs statewide whose funding could be gutted by the shuttering of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the latest in a series of moves by President Donald Trump’s administration to slash “wasteful” spending.
The platform has helped connect military veterans to employment resources, provided tutoring services for children and tools to learn different languages, all for free — federal funding through IMLS offsets the costs of the $1.6 million system.
“All of these resources, which would ordinarily cost individual libraries or even individuals a lot of money if they wanted access, are shared here as a resource with all public libraries,” said Lisa Varga, executive director for the Virginia Library Association.
She added that the platform is also available to Virginia’s schools and is “an incredible asset, because there are so many schools, like rural schools, that don’t have the money for these databases.” IMLS grants make it possible for every student in the state to have access to programs and services like FindItVirginia, Varga said.
Federal agencies in the crosshairs
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, is one of the several entities included for elimination in Trump’s March 14 executive order to cut government waste, along with the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and the Minority Business Development Agency.
In the order, Trump directed the government entities to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” and to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel” to the minimum required by law.
The order also directed the offices to “reject” funding requests if they were inconsistent with the president’s directive. The office had seven days to file a plan, but Trump appointed a new IMLS director in the closing days, which could have led to the office’s delay in submitting its plans.
The public learned later that officials placed staff on administrative leave before the end of March.
Varga said, as of last week, she was unaware of any plan IMLS may have drawn up or submitted. In the meantime, libraries are now “scrambling” to ensure they can still provide resources.
“The hard part is not knowing, and we don’t know what to plan for,” Varga said.
Virginia received at least $6 million in grants from IMLS in 2024 to help fund educational programs and digitize historical records, according to agency records. Those funds were provided through the Library Services and Technology Act, which is designed to support library services, technology, access and literacy programs for underserved communities.
The funding has also supported higher education institutions like Old Dominion University, Virginia Tech’s libraries, Virginia Union University’s Center for African American History and Culture & Library Services, George Mason University’s Virtual Library of Virginia and the University of Virginia Library.
Statewide implications for universities, museums and libraries
In 2024, the Children’s Museum of Richmond received a $188,000 grant from the Museums for America Grant fund to expand its school readiness programs and resources in the Richmond area. The grant will also help educators with Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education to gather insights.
Sarah Newman, a spokeswoman for the Children’s Museum of Richmond, said the organization is still assessing the implications of the IMLS suspension. Other institutions, including the Christiansburg Institute and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, are doing the same.
Newman said that nearly half of Virginia’s kindergartners still need to build literacy, math, self-regulation and social development skills. In response, the museum supports families preparing children for kindergarten through its Trailblazer Club. She said the disparities are even more alarming for Hispanic and English language learners. The threat of losing funding could devastate the program and several others.
“As a small nonprofit, this funding is not just meaningful—-it’s essential. The Museums for America grant enables us to commit staff time, develop curriculum, offer materials to families, and build lasting partnerships with early learning providers. Without this investment, the Trailblazer Club would not be possible at its current scale.”
Annually, IMLS awards funding to states including Virginia from the Grants to State Library Administrative Agencies fund, which is the largest source of federal dollars for library services in the U.S.
Last year, Virginia received $9.7 million from IMLS, including $4.3 million for LVA, dedicated to supporting the library’s goals over the next five years: developing community libraries for “lifelong learning” and “civic engagement”; providing access to information and cultural heritage to develop an informed community; and enhancing training for library leadership and staff to adapt to a changing environment.
The grant funding has supported the state’s newspaper archive program, adult services consulting and public library infrastructure.
Dennis Clark, the Librarian of Virginia, stated that it is “extremely unlikely” the Library of Virginia would be able to make up any funding cuts to its statewide initiatives. He noted that 16% of the library’s budget comes from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and this funding supports between 30 and 35 positions, which accounts for 25% of the Library of Virginia’s workforce.
“Rural public and school libraries in particular depend on the online databases, summer reading programs, and interlibrary loans that IMLS funding provides,” Clark said in a statement. “Libraries are the nexus of community and civic engagement, and are available to every Virginian, regardless of education, income, or status and the elimination of the IMLS puts that in jeopardy.”
Clark said the library expects the funding from the grants to remain available through the end of the fiscal year, which closes Sept. 30. However, as of Friday afternoon, the library has not received its last funding infusion.
“All other funding — the majority of what Virginia receives — would likely be considered discretionary, and it’s unlikely that those obligations will be met, as there are no longer active IMLS employees,” Clark said.
He said given that the Museum and Library Services Act expires this year, and the intent of Trump’s executive order, the act “seems unlikely to be reauthorized.”
Virginia’s 2024 Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The following institutions received federal funds distributed from the Institute of Museum and Library Services:- Library of Virginia: $4,289,358
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Libraries): $115,398
- Christiansburg Institute: $318,830
- Virginia Union University (Center for African American History and Culture & Library Services): $52,253
- Children’s Museum of Richmond: $188,245
- Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art: $32,399
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Libraries): $441,724
- George Mason University (The Virtual Library of Virginia): $248,235
- University of Virginia (University of Virginia Library): $149,842
- Old Dominion University: $117,707
- The Library of Virginia: $172,828
Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services