Latest news with #NMAAHC
Black America Web
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Black America Web
Concerns Grow Over Removed Exhibits At NMAAHC AKA ‘The Blacksonian'
Source: Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Amidst President Trump's flurry of executive orders targeting civil rights and Black history, concerns are growing over exhibits being rotated out at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). According to NBC News, certain artifacts and exhibits detailing the history of slavery and the civil rights movement are being rotated out of NMAAHC amid a potential review by the White House. In March, President Trump signed the 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,' executive order that, among many other things, requires museums to remove exhibits that showcase 'improper ideology.' Of course, 'improper ideology' is simply code for 'any piece of American history that makes white people feel uncomfortable and/or reminds them of the horrors this country was built on.' But I get it, 'improper ideology' is less of a mouthful. From NBC News: NBC News went inside the museum and found at least 32 artifacts that were once on display have been removed. They include Harriet Tubman's book of hymns filled with gospels that she is believed to have sung as she led enslaved people to freedom through the underground railroad, as well as a cloth made by enslaved people and a photo of the hip-hop group Public Enemy. Also removed was the 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,' the memoir by one of the most important leaders in the abolition movement. Both items were gifted to the Smithsonian. Both the White House and NMAAHC have pushed back against the idea that these removals were a result of the executive order. White House spokesperson Lindsey Halligan issued a statement saying, 'The White House had no involvement in removing any exhibit from the National Museum of African American History and Culture or any other Smithsonian institution. They did this on their own accord.' Additionally, the NMAAHC has also issued a statement on their website saying that 'recent claims that objects have been removed for reasons other than adherence to standard loan agreements or museum practices are false.' Source: The Washington Post / Getty I'd love to sit here and say, 'Well, that's that. This is a completely innocent, not at all suspect move by the museum.' Though when one considers that the former director of the NMAAHC left as a result of the Executive Order, and that both Chief Justice John Roberts and Vice President J.D Vance sit on the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, it doesn't entirely pass muster. Those who loaned the items to the NMAAHC also aren't entirely convinced that their return wasn't politically motivated. From NBC News: Liz Brazelton, the owner of a diary connected to the Oscar-winning film '12 Years a Slave,' isn't convinced either. She's the great-great-granddaughter of the lawyer who helped free Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped and forced into slavery… …she gave one of her great-great-grandfather's diaries to the museum in September 2015 on a 10-year loan. The museum sent her a letter in March, before the end of the term, saying, 'We have decided to move ahead with the return a bit early to coincide with our internal gallery rotation schedule.' The letter was sent two weeks before Trump signed the executive order targeting exhibits at the Smithsonian, which raised a red flag for Brazelton. The removal of these items from the NMAAHC comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly made attacks on free speech, DEI initiatives, and Black History. In April, the National Park Service came under scrutiny after it removed the story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad from several exhibits. They eventually restored the exhibits after national outcry, but the fact that they even had the audacity to try it should tell you everything about where this administration's priorities lie. As a result of the executive order and leadership changes at the NMAAHC, the museum was the site of the #HandsOffOurHistory rally earlier this month. The executive order, along with other moves by the Trump Administration, also spurred legislation from Democratic lawmakers to protect civil rights landmarks on the national register from being sold (because, of course, the Trump administration tried to do that). While it's clear the Trump administration won't stop coming for our history, the grassroots efforts by community leaders and select politicians have proven that they'll damn sure have to fight for it. SEE ALSO: Racial Bias: Audit Finds 36 In-Custody Deaths Should Be Labeled Homicides This Was Supposed To Be A Review Of 'Forever,' But It's Not SEE ALSO Concerns Grow Over Removed Exhibits At NMAAHC AKA 'The Blacksonian' was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
These activists are ‘flooding the zone with Black history' to protest Trump's attacks on DEI
A coalition of civil rights groups have launched a weeklong initiative to condemn Donald Trump's attacks on Black history, including recent executive orders targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC. The national Freedom to Learn campaign is being led by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a social justice thinktank co-founded by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw is a leading expert on critical race theory (CRT), a framework used to analyze racism's structural impact. She has fought against book bans, restraints on racial history teaching and other anti-DEI efforts since the beginning of the Republican-led campaign against CRT in 2020. 'Our goal this week has been to flood the zone, as we call it, with Black history,' Crenshaw said about the campaign. 'We have long understood that the attacks on ideas germinating from racial justice were not about the specific targets of each attack … [but are] an effort to impose a specific narrative about the United States of America, one that marginalizes, and even erases, its more difficult chapters,' she added. The weeklong campaign will conclude with a demonstration and prayer vigil in front of NMAAHC on 3 May. Leading up to the protest, AAPF, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and six other advocacy groups signed onto a statement criticizing Trump's 'attempted mass erasure of Black history and culture', according to a press release published 28 April. In March, Trump ordered an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution, the world's largest museum network, in order to demolish what he described as 'improper, divisive or anti-American ideology'. He singled out NAAMHC, a museum that has been lauded since its opening in 2016. The coalition's affirmation read, in part: 'We affirm that Black history is American history, without which we cannot understand our country's fight for freedom or secure a more democratic future. We must protect our history not just in books, schools, libraries, and universities, but also in museums, memorials, and remembrances that are sites of our national memory.' 'I wasn't shocked by it,' said Crenshaw of Trump's executive order against NAAMHC. 'I never did think that these attacks on civil rights, on racial equality, would find a natural limit because there is no limit.' Within this week's movement, AAPF has led sessions to educate people on Trump's dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, an element of the broader campaign. About 1,500 people attended a virtual event titled Under the Black Light: Beyond the First 100 Days: Centering Racial Justice and Black History in Our Fight for Democracy. There, panelists, including civil rights leaders and academics, discussed how attendees could organize against Trump's mounting censorship of history. Coffee meetups and a sign-making session were organized as additional parts of the campaign, providing further conversations between participants and academics about how Trump's initial executive orders connect to a larger thread of eroding racial justice. The group has also launched a 'Black history challenge' where participants are encouraged to find a historical site or artifact and 'put it into memory', or recognize it, 'as part of Black history's role in American history'. As a part of the challenge, Crenshaw posted a video on social media of Bruce's Beach, in Manhattan Beach, California. There, in 1912, a Black couple purchased oceanfront property and built a resort for Black people. The property was later seized by the city under the auspices of eminent domain. 'It's important to tell these stories so people understand that it's not a natural reality that many Black folks don't have beachfront property or that we don't have transnational hotel chains owned by Black people,' said Crenshaw. 'These things are actually created by the weaponization of law to impose white, exclusive rights and privileges.' The weeklong campaign comes as the Trump administration has attempted to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at all levels of local and federal government since the start of his second term. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from any public schools that do not end their DEI programming. He later signed executive orders to crack down on diversity efforts at colleges and universities. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Crenshaw added: 'If you want to sustain this idea of making America great again, then you've got to erase the ways that it wasn't great all along. We've always understood that what the end game was, was the elimination of any recognition that our country has had and still has challenges with respect to racial and other forms of justice.' In response, advocacy groups have come together to channel their outrage into the collective action of the campaign and protest. 'We want to be sure that we can preserve, beyond artifacts, the true experiences of those that have [undergone] the oppressive past of African Americans, and how that experience of resilience is important today,' said Reverend Shavon Arline-Bradley, president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). A partnership, especially given the importance of the NMAAHC, felt like the most significant way forward, said Arline-Bradley. 'This really is a collective, multiracial, multicultural, multi experience, coalition that is saying no. When you take away our history, when you take away African American history, then you really are trying to take away culture.'
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hakeem Jeffries presses John Roberts to stop Trump's power grab over Smithsonian museums
In a recent letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged the Supreme Court's top justice to use his power as a member of the Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents to oppose President Donald Trump's efforts to 'whitewash' the country's history. The letter took aim at Trump's March 27 executive order that accuses the Smithsonian Institution — which includes dozens of museums, libraries and architectural landmarks — of pushing 'improper ideology.' The order purportedly seeks to 'restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.' In reality, it's an illiberal, racist attack on the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and on Black history more broadly. In his letter, Jeffries implored Roberts — one of 17 regents on the Smithsonian's board and chancellor of the Smithsonian — to "continue the storied legacy of the Smithsonian that tells the American story honestly and completely." The New York Democrat also compared Trump's order to tactics used by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: History is replete with dangerous efforts to manipulate cultural and historical narratives in order to consolidate power, including during the twentieth-century regimes like those in the Soviet Union and 1930s Germany. That is not America. I strongly urge you to reject the Proclamation targeting the Smithsonian and to uphold the 175-year tradition that has made the Institution the preeminent museum, educational and cultural system in the world. Trump's order is essentially part of an Orwellian effort to crack down on teachings conservatives dislike. He made that clear when he specifically targeted an exhibit at the NMAAHC that highlights and dispels racist pseudoscience, decrying the exhibit's thesis that 'race is not a biological reality but a social construct.' This is par for the course for Trump, who has a history of peddling racist pseudoscience. The order is also part of a broader attempt by Trump to bend museums and libraries — institutions dedicated to ideological exploration and inquisition — to his will. Trump has reportedly taken steps to slash federal funding for local museums and libraries across the country, and I explained earlier this month the disturbing similarities between such a move and steps taken by Nazi Germany to control public discourse. Read Jeffries' letter in full below: Given Roberts has arguably been one of Trump's chief enablers, it's hard to imagine he will halt Trump's overreach on this matter. But Jeffries' letter shows the extent to which liberals — Black liberals, in particular — are deploying unprecedented tactics to stop the president from turning America's top museums into platforms for his propaganda. On May 3, the National Council of Negro Women, the nearly century-old group founded by activist Mary McLeod Bethune, is scheduled to hold a day of national 'mobilization' against Trump's attempt to erase Black history and target Black cultural sites. 'Our ancestors have seen racism before,' NCNW's president and CEO, the Rev. Shavon Arline-Bradley, said during a recent interview with Black Press USA. 'But they haven't seen this level of foolishness in the White House that is outright anti-law. What we're seeing now is lawlessness.' This article was originally published on
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What It Means to Tell the Truth About America
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. [Phillip Atiba Solomon: Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class?] 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. [Read: Why is Trump mad at the zoo?] 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. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What It Means to Tell the Truth About America
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. Phillip Atiba Solomon: Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class? 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. Read: Why is Trump mad at the zoo? 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.
