Trump’s foolish attempt to rewrite history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Trump's threat to withhold federal funds because of "improper ideology" could have a chilling effect on the museum's programming.
Nobel laureate William Faulkner once observed: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
With the troubling, revisionist, and narrow-minded executive order he signed last month called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” President Donald Trump isn’t trying so much to kill the past as cover it up with as many layers of lily-white paint as he can.
In the order, Trump claims there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Here is one objective fact the president may not want to acknowledge: “Race-centered ideology” is woven into the fabric of our nation. The truth is that the founding principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” did not include Black people.
The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, who enslaved over 600 Black people. When Jefferson came to Philadelphia to write the document, he was accompanied by his enslaved valet, Robert Hemmings.
The fact is Americans were divided by race long before the birth of the nation. Slavery was legal in the 13 states that formed the new republic. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. “Our shared past” includes the ratification of the U.S. Constitution that counted enslaved human beings as three-fifths of a person, mandated the self-emancipated be returned to bondage, and prohibited Congress from banning the transatlantic slave trade until 1808.
The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation (the nation’s first constitution), and the Constitution were adopted in the building now known as Independence Hall. It is an objective fact that fugitive slave hearings were held in Independence Hall. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Americans to collaborate in the arrest of enslaved people who tried to escape their captors.
More facts: The South seceded from the Union to preserve a divisive, race-centered ideology. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens said the quiet part out loud:
After the Civil War, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Ladies’ Memorial Association, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected monuments “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine. Americans were legally divided based on race until the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The assertion of “consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union” is belied by ... well, the facts. The U.S. Justice Department sued Trump for housing discrimination in 1973.
A portrait of President John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, adorns Trump’s blinged-out Oval Office. Adams was in the minority of Founding Fathers who did not own slaves. A lawyer, Adams represented soldiers who were prosecuted by the British for their involvement with the Boston Massacre. In his argument for the defense, Adams said:
Trump stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the nation’s complex history. Instead, his executive order directs Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo. To borrow Adams’ phrasing, Trump wants to “alter the state of facts and evidence.”
One of Trump’s prime targets is the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I am a charter member of the museum. I attended the grand opening weekend, and have visited numerous times since then. In my eager anticipation of the museum’s opening, I would stop by while the building was under construction.
The museum traveled a long road to tell visitors the hard truth.
More than a century ago, a group of Civil War veterans made what’s believed to be one of the first proposals for a national Black history museum. In 1915, one Black veterans group, the Committee of Colored Citizens, formed the National Memorial Association to create a permanent memorial recognizing African Americans’ military contributions.
After years of false starts, President George W. Bush signed the legislation authorizing construction of the museum on Dec. 16, 2003. At the dedication of the museum on Sept. 24, 2016, Bush said:
President Trump himself visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture during Black History Month in 2017. His remarks then stand in stark contrast to the executive order:
The museum holds countless examples of that spirit — the stories of African American heroes who believed, in the words of poet Langston Hughes: “O, let America be America again—/ The land that never has been yet—/ And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”
In an email to staff, Lonnie G. Bunch, the museum’s founding director who is now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, affirmed the Smithsonian will “remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research, and the arts to all Americans. We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy.”
We all must resist Trump’s foolhardy attempt to rewrite history.
His threat to withhold federal funds could have a chilling effect on the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s programming. The museum’s funding sources include members and small donors.
Money talks. If you believe facts matter, join or make a donation to ensure the museum will continue to have the resources to tell the full American story.
Faye M. Anderson is a community historian and director of All That Philly Jazz, a public history project documenting and contextualizing Philadelphia’s golden age of jazz. She can be contacted at [email protected].