What It Means to Tell the Truth About America

The Atlantic

21-04-2025

Elizabeth Hays, a white woman from central North Carolina, had never been to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But earlier this month, after she read about Donald Trump's executive order targeting the museum and others throughout the Smithsonian system, she made the nearly five-hour drive up to Washington, D.C., to visit. She was worried that if she waited any longer, she might encounter a sanitized version of the museum, or no museum at all.
She told me this in front of a display focused on contemporary manifestations of Black protest. Elisa Hill, a Black woman from Maryland, was visiting that day too. 'I'm very worried about what's going to happen here,' Hill told me, shaking her head. 'Because it represents the history that we all need to know and understand. I'm just afraid that it's going to be censored.'
I, too, had carried this concern since hearing about the executive order. I tried to contact museum officials—including Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian and the founding director of NMAAHC—but each person I reached out to was unavailable. I was not surprised by this response. Smithsonian officials no doubt fear that if they speak publicly about the executive order, then they, and the institution, might be further targeted. So instead, I made a trip to NMAAHC, hoping to talk directly with people there and take stock of what might be lost.
Lonnie G. Bunch III: Why is America afraid of Black history?
Every time I visit NMAAHC, the first person I think of is Ruth Odom Bonner. On September 24, 2016, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama stood alongside the 99-year-old Bonner—and three other generations of her family—to ring the bell signaling the opening of the museum to the public. Bonner's presence that day was significant because she was the daughter of a man who was born into slavery. Not the granddaughter. Not the great-granddaughter. The woman who opened NMAAHC was the child of a man born in bondage. His name was Elijah Odom.
As a young boy, Odom and his brothers had escaped to freedom. He became a farmer, lived through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and ultimately attended and graduated from medical school, becoming the only practicing Black physician in his community of Bisco, Arkansas. Elijah Odom's life represented the possibility that existed on the other side of slavery. In 2016, his daughter Ruth was a reminder that the history presented in the museum she helped inaugurate did not happen all that long ago.
The history inside the museum still reverberates through our country. It is impossible to understand the contemporary landscape of social, political, and economic inequality without understanding the forces and events that served as its catalysts. This is why so many have worked so hard to silence this history.
Upon my arrival at NMAAHC, I stumbled onto a tour of a new exhibit, In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World, a project that places the experiences of slavery, colonialism, and freedom-making across the world in conversation with one another.
The docent leading the tour, Edward Flanagan, was a Black man who looked to be in his 80s. He wore a black long-sleeve shirt with the face of James Baldwin alongside his words: 'Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.'
'The only way that slavery works is the continued public application of violence and terror,' Flanagan told the group. He laced his hands together in front of his body. 'Also, race does not exist. It is a social construct made necessary by unrestrained capitalism, colonialism, and the slave trade. Those three items are going to come up again and again and again. Those are the things that have formed your world.'
This idea, that capitalism, slavery, and colonialism are the forces that have shaped our contemporary world, is central to the exhibit. And it occurred to me, listening to Flanagan, that this was the exact sort of story that Trump and many of his allies would like to excise from museums, classrooms, and every other realm of American life.
What would it mean if every American understood, as Flanagan said, that a large portion of the country's millionaires in the mid-19th century lived along the Mississippi? Or, as he later shared, that many of our most prestigious universities established before 1865 were built using the profits of chattel slavery? These are empirical facts, not ideological ones. And as more Americans have come to understand this history, they have, appropriately, begun to question much of what they have been taught about America.
Many universities, for instance, have begun in recent years to acknowledge the ways slavery provided the capital for their infrastructure, and the fact that such infrastructure was often literally constructed by enslaved laborers. Commissions have been formed. Memorials have been erected. New courses have been offered. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that these are some of the same institutions that have been most directly targeted by Trump, who has threatened to pull federal funding from universities that engage in anything that falls under his nebulous definition of DEI. Many colleges and universities are capitulating. Some are fighting back.
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Perhaps the most striking part of the exhibit was the section on rebellions. Flanagan came to a map of the world with clusters of dots, most of them between the Americas and the West African coast, crossing the Atlantic like a bridge connecting the two continents. Contrary to what many believe, he explained, rebellions were a relatively common occurrence on slave ships; the dots represented those uprisings. The caption beneath the map stated that captured Africans revolted during one in 10 slave-trade voyages. 'Notice the concentration along the coast of Africa,' Flanagan said. Many of these revolts, he told us, took place when the vessels were docked offshore and land was still in sight. The captives would think, ' I can still see home. It's right over there.'
Flanagan told the group the story of the Amistad, a slave ship traveling from Cuba to Long Island that became the site of an 1839 slave revolt. The captured Africans were arrested by American officials. But in 1841, the case made it to the Supreme Court, where the captives were defended by former President John Quincy Adams, and where the justices ruled in their favor, granting them their freedom and allowing them to sail back to their homeland of Sierra Leone.
Flanagan pointed to three framed images behind him—court sketches. Between the sketches was a quote from one of the rebels, a man named Sengbe, who said, 'I am resolved that it is better to die than be a white man's slave.'
A group of teenagers who had been eavesdropping on Flanagan's presentation eventually dropped all pretense and joined the group. One young woman—with brown skin, hoop earrings, and long braids—walked up to the sketches of the kidnapped Africans, pulled out her phone, and took a picture of the sketches and the quote between them. I remembered my time as a high-school teacher and how, during discussions on slavery, so many of my Black students would ask why more enslaved people hadn't fought back. Resistance to enslavement came in many forms, of course, oftentimes more subtle than outright rebellion. But knowing that a rebellion occurred during one-tenth of slave-trade voyages helps disabuse people, especially students, of the idea that the enslaved simply accepted the conditions that had been forced upon them—and shows that, in many cases, captured Africans resisted long before they reached the shores of the Americas.
Black resistance, Flanagan told the group, has always existed. This exhibit, and this museum more broadly, allows us to see it. It also reminds us that resistance is possible in our own time—which is exactly the sort of thing that's led authoritarian regimes around the world to scrub examples of political resistance from classrooms, books, and the internet.
As the tour came to an end, Flanagan asked if anyone in the group had questions. A clean-shaven white man raised his hand and asked, 'Sir, were you a Freedom Rider?' Flanagan smiled and nodded. 'I was a Freedom Rider, yes.' The group began to murmur with surprise and admiration.
'I came here all the way from Alaska,' the man said. 'May I take a picture with you?' Flanagan nodded and waved for the man to come up next to him; the man's wife took their photograph.
After the group had dispersed, I went up to Flanagan and introduced myself. He told me that he has been volunteering as a docent at NMAAHC for the past three years but has been a fan of the museum since it opened and was a supporter even before that. 'They've been taking my money since 2003,' he said, laughing, referencing the year George W. Bush signed legislation authorizing the creation of the museum. The process of becoming a docent, he said, was more difficult than getting either of his master's degrees. 'I had to be able to do the whole museum,' he said. The museum is also, for Flanagan, a family affair. His daughter is part of the museum's team that coordinates educational programming.
In the 1960s, as a college student at Howard University, Flanagan traveled from Washington, D.C., to Rockville, South Carolina, challenging the enforcement of laws that prohibited integration in public transportation and facilities. He decided to become a Freedom Rider during the civil-rights movement for the same reason he decided to become a docent at NMAAHC during the Black Lives Matter movement. He put his hands in his pockets, shrugged, and said, 'You gotta do something.'
I asked Flanagan what he thought about the recent executive order. He smiled. 'I am told not to talk about that while I'm wearing my badge and my lanyard,' he said. Then his face became more sober. 'What I will say is that as a docent, I would like to tell, as John Hope Franklin says, the unvarnished truth. And one of the things we strive to do is tell the real story.'
What Flanagan understands is that the real story of America includes the story of slavery. He looked around at all the people walking through the exhibit. The elders. The students. The families. 'I love this museum,' he said. 'They'll have to beat me away with a stick.'
In his March 27 executive order, President Trump directed Vice President J. D. Vance to 'remove improper ideology' from NMAAHC and other Smithsonian museums. As I walked around the museum, I wondered which of these exhibits would fall under that rubric. What does it mean for something to be improper if the administration's understanding of what is acceptable excludes anything that might make white Americans feel bad? Is the statue of Thomas Jefferson surrounded by bricks inscribed with the names of people he enslaved improper? Is a slave cabin that once sat on the grounds of a plantation in South Carolina improper? Are the shackles that were once locked around the feet of enslaved children improper? Is Harriet Tubman's silk shawl improper? Is Nat Turner's Bible improper? Is Emmett Till's casket improper? Are the photographs of men and women who were lynched as white audiences looked on improper?
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is not a place that traffics in improper ideology. It is a museum that recognizes that America has been suffused in improper ideologies for most of its history: ideologies that ignore the centrality of slavery to the nation's founding. Ideologies that tell us the Civil War was simply about states' rights. Ideologies that call Reconstruction a failure rather than a campaign that was actively destroyed. Ideologies that excise the important role of queer and female activists during the civil-rights movement. Ideologies that ignore the connections between racism and incarceration. Ideologies that tell Americans that the contemporary landscape of inequality in this country has nothing to do with history, and is simply a result of who has worked hard and who has not.
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Several years ago, I visited the museum with my grandparents—my grandfather, who was born in 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, and my grandmother, who was born in 1939 Jim Crow Florida. Inside, I pushed my grandfather in his wheelchair, his cane laid across his lap, a map of the museum in his hands. My grandmother walked behind us and moved ahead of us with an effortless independence, her gait steady and unhurried. I remember watching them take in the exhibits and remark upon how proximate they felt to what was on display. When I asked my grandmother about it later, she kept repeating the words I lived it. I lived it. I lived it.
My grandmother's history exists inside this museum. Ruth Odom Bonner's history exists inside this museum. This nation's history exists inside this museum. Attempting to strip the institution of the stories that tell the truth about who we have been is an attempt to perpetuate a lie about who we are.