Targeting a Black History Museum Puts Black People – and Everyone – in the Crosshairs

As family lore has it, my great-great-great-grandmother was enslaved in rural Georgia in the years before the Civil War. She had two sons by the man who held her in bondage. After emancipation, she remained with him on his land, living essentially as a family unit. I do not know if she was legally married to him, but I doubt Georgia law would have allowed it back then.

It is unclear when this slaveowner died, but my understanding is that when he did, he left his land to my ancestor and her sons. That land was passed down until the state of Georgia took it over to make room for a highway. One of my mother’s cousins lived there as an elderly man, but did not know it could have been preserved as a historical site.

When they came to remove him from the home, they found him dead of a heart attack with a shotgun in his hands. With him died the physical remnants of one family’s story.

ROOTed

This story was passed down to me through oral tradition. There are probably things unwittingly omitted. Inaccuracies, missing details, and unnamed characters. But as a child, I was inspired by the resolve of my ancestors. History has been one of my most focused interests. I saw it as a window into time, always wondering if there was a way to fully tell the stories of people whose voices are forever silenced.

So I cannot imagine being told that I could not have access to that information because a politician is embarrassed by the facts of the struggle of the people whose blood courses through my veins. Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order that targeted the Smithsonian Institution, accusing it of ‘divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.” He singled out the National Museum of African American History and Culture in this vein, and J.D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, was charged with removing portrayals of “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Given that Black history in America since its inception provides story after story of oppression at the hands of an institutional hierarchy of white males who felt everyone else was inferior, this almost certainly means that the Trump Administration intends to erase facts with a misleading “truth.” If it seems like I’m overreacting, just look at the last three months of hell the Trump administration has put this country through and ask me again.

It’s the latest in a sordid saga of far-right wing ideologues who wish to replace the realities of American history with a sanitized version that makes them sleep better at night. These same types went after critical race theory in education, believing that it was making white people look bad. The reality is that it is a concept that looks at race as a part of the law and policies. Let people like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tell it, CRT is out to teach kindergartners that white people, including their parents, are evil monsters bent on torturing their classmates.

Sociologist Robin D’Angelo outlined this kind of sentiment, which she called “white fragility.” She defined it basically as white people getting defensive when their racial worldviews are challenged. Not all white people are like this, but for those who are, the reaction to seeing a depiction of what my ancestor experienced would be to say something like “Blacks owned slaves, too,” or “Africans sold Blacks into slavery,” or maybe they’ll accuse a Black person of “playing the race card.” Anything to deflect real facts.

But whitewashing history is nothing new. It took generations to get middle school history books to include accounts of slavery that said little more than “the slaves were happy.” Many also described the Civil War as the “war between the states” instead of the accurate description of it being a war in which the Confederacy seceded from the Union so they could continue to hold slaves.

There simply is no honest historian who would say anything different. Still, that’s just one of the many, many things that we have been discovering in the past few decades, not only about the history of Black people in this country, but all over the world. Let’s not even get started on the history of many other people in America, much of which remains hidden.

Soul Brain

This is not to say all of Black history is a cloud of misery. We already know the well-documented sacrifices and contributions of Black people to everything in America, from technology to human rights. We have pushed back against tyrants, foreign and domestic, gave voice to what freedom truly means – and let’s face it – we’ve been America’s soul every day for more than 400 years.

But there are soulless people whose intention is to end that, and an attack on the NMAAHC is evidence of that. This is only one step from Project 2025’s plan to end the Department of Education and remove federal oversight of schools and libraries, giving it to states, many of which are under the control of politicians who would have no problem teaching redacted history or lessons that show a historical bias. “The slaves were happy,” indeed.

The NMAAAHC is a 10-story structure that sits in central Washington, D.C., between the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian National Museum. It opened in 2016 and has more than 1 million annual visitors, most of whom will tell you it is almost impossible to see every exhibit in one day. Depictions of American history related to Black people range from the development of Black music in America to the actual casket of Emmett Till.

The museum shows its visitors the good and bad, the bitter and better of what it has been like to live Black in America, and there is no way I could truly do it justice with a description here. I can only encourage you to visit it if you have not yet.

I’d especially encourage going to see it as soon as you can because once Vance gets hold of it, unless he is convinced to leave it alone, I cannot imagine him, under Trump’s edict, allowing the exhibits to remain as they are if they are seen as “ideological.” or “woke.”

But dismantling a museum like this sends two messages. First, it tells all of America that history, as it happened, isn’t important, and what is important is preserving the comfort level of people who might wind up seeing themselves as the bad guys of history. At the very least, the stories would be rewritten to ensure their comfort level – again, white fragility.

The best example is the asinine story of the first Thanksgiving, in which pilgrims and Wampanoag tribe members broke bread together in friendship. The reality is that their meeting led to 50 years of war, disease, and colonization. But every November, we get one of the biggest lies told in American history.

The second message is one directed at Black Americans, point blank, like a musket: We don’t like you, boy! Just like the anti-DEI push, this is intended to let us know that we cannot have power in this country, and the only ones who can are a select few in Trump’s circle. They are telling us that we are simply being tolerated and shouldn’t step out of line.

So, if I were to offer Black people who voted for Trump a message, it would be that this is precisely what you voted for. Don’t act like no one told you.

Now, it could be that Vance handles the museum very gingerly, and he’ll listen to the people who run NMAAHC on how important preserving history is. But given that by his admission, his political philosophy was formed by watching “Boyz in the Hood” without understanding the message it sent to Black people, it tells me that he’d miss the point of having Till’s glass-topped coffin lie in the museum.

Making the effort to be reassuring, Lonnie Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of the NMAAHC, reportedly told staff in a memo that the organization will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections, and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy.”

It is good that he has made this effort, but it remains to be seen what will happen with the board of regents and if things really will remain the same. Trump declared himself chair of another institution, the Kennedy Center, and its patrons were so offended at his anti-everyone stance that multiple performances that would otherwise have been welcome there have been cancelled.

(Third Great-) Grandma’s Hands

The location of my matriarch ancestor’s grave is likely lost to history. She was probably laid to rest on the land where she was once enslaved, then raised her sons as a free Black woman. It may have been enough for her that her two boys would be able to make their own way in the world, still facing the days of Reconstruction and a political structure that sought to hinder them, but at least not legally bound to anything they did not own themselves.

When my relatives and I talk about her, we wonder about who she was and about the things she did. Was her relationship with her slavemaster consensual, or did she do it as a means of survival? Was she literate? How did she come to be on that plantation? My mother speculated that either she or her mother was born in West Africa, but I don’t think that is true. Despite this, we are all thankful that at least this small part of her story can be told and passed down.

It is a part of us all that cannot be erased. It would be a shame for America if this regime, which is ultimately trying to put all of American society in its crosshairs, decided that our collective history can.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.