The trumpian Whitening of American History
S. E. Anderson
Whitening American History
Philadelphia’s President’s House Site, where Presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived, saw a number of its exhibits red-flagged by the trump administration in 2025. Six exhibits and 13 specific items within them were pinpointed for review in accordance with Executive Order 14253: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
All those exhibits focused on slavery—specifically, the nine people whom Washington enslaved while living in Philadelphia.
Passersby were surprised to see National Park Service (NPS) employees abruptly removing these exhibits on January 22. One employee was heard repeatedly saying, “I’m just following orders” from his supervisor. In the span of an hour, all the displays were gone.
Days later, the city of Philadelphia sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the NPS, arguing that the federal government violated a cooperative agreement for the site’s development. On February 16, halfway through Black History Month, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ruled against the trump administration, comparing its rationale for dismantling the exhibit to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not,” Rute’s ruling stated.
“The removed displays,” Rute continued, “were not mere decorations to be taken down and redisplayed; rather, they were a memorial to ‘men, women, and children of African descent who lived, worked, and died as enslaved people in the United States of America,’ a tribute to their struggle for freedom, and an enduring reminder of the inherent contradictions emanating from this country’s founding.
“Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history,” she concluded.
Rute ordered the exhibit to be restored by the end of Friday, February 20, and barred the trump administration from creating new interpretations of the President’s House history. On Thursday, NPS employees reinstalled the panels.
Last week, the trump administration filed an appeal. In their statement, the Department of the Interior and the NPS sought to justify the removal, claiming that “the National Park Service routinely updates exhibits across the park system to ensure historical accuracy and completeness.”
“If not for this unnecessary judicial intervention,” their statement continued, “updated interpretive materials providing a fuller account of the history of slavery at Independence Hall would have been installed in the coming days.” What exactly these materials would focus on, or how they would “provide a fuller account” of the history of enslavement remains unclear.
The Prospect reached out to the Department of the Interior and the NPS requesting information on how these exhibits would differ from the originals and did not receive a response.
THE RULING WAS STILL A WIN, at least temporarily, for those advocating against the trump administration’s relentless attempts to erase Black history. It was yet another salvo in the battle over how to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary.
At the very moment that America’s founders, assembled in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, signed the Declaration asserting that all men were created equal, Black people were systematically enslaved across the burgeoning country. Philadelphia in particular was a hub for the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Independence Hall itself was built in part by enslaved people.
Although “America250” has been almost a decade in the making (the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission was established in 2016 by Congress), the trump administration has made significant changes to the topics the celebration will emphasize. Although the commission is meant to be nonpartisan, trump has installed his campaign officials as its leaders, dismissed contractors who have ties to Democrats, and partnered with conservative organizations such as PragerU and Moms for Liberty.
Originally, America250 was going to take a multigenerational, multiracial approach to recognizing U.S. history. Now that focus has shifted. Instead, the legacies of the nation’s founders have been pushed to the forefront.
“When we double down on the Founding Fathers, we’re never talking about how problematic many of them were,” says Seth Levi, chief program strategy officer for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “While they of course did make contributions to helping to form these United States, many of them enslaved people. Many of them actually held very anti-democratic viewpoints.”
The trump administration’s approach to the nation’s founding is part of its larger attempt to reframe or dismiss Black Americans’ contributions to U.S. history and culture. Such executive orders as “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” trump’s commitment to dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) frameworks, and combating “racial indoctrination” in schools have placed dozens of projects that highlight the less palatable aspects of American history under siege.
Most of them relate to the historical, and ongoing, oppression of marginalized groups, particularly Black and Indigenous people.
“It’s an effort to return to a notion of a United States where we no longer think or talk about the history on which the country was founded, this sort of very fundamental kind of racial history and discriminatory history and divisive history,” says Nikhil Pal Singh, a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University. “We don’t recognize its importance. And along with that, we push, in some sense, the Black people and the representations of Black people and Black history out of public view.”
These efforts have manifested in various ways. Last March, after trump had signed an executive order that aimed to disassemble all federal DEI activity, the Pentagon flagged media content marked as “DEI” on its websites for review. Many of these web pages and photos highlighted Black veterans, such as the Tuskegee Airmen. They were later restored, after considerable public outcry.
But the NPS was able to successfully scrub its web pages focused on the Underground Railroad of language referring to slavery, and cut statements related to Black Americans’ struggle for equal rights. This included removing a photo of and a quote from Harriet Tubman and replacing them with pictures of abolitionists titled “Black/White Cooperation.” The page was later reverted back to its original state.
But not all of these attempts to rewrite or erase Black history have been unsuccessful. In September, the trump administration ordered the NPS to remove signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks. This included materials such as “The Scourged Back,” a photo that shows the scarred back of Peter, a man who escaped enslavement, and information at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, where abolitionist John Brown led a raid in an effort to arm enslaved people for a revolt.
Even the Smithsonian Institution, the country’s federally funded group of world-class museums and research centers, has come under presidential fire. The White House released a document in August called “President trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” which provides examples of exhibits that apparently display the Smithsonian’s “divisive, race-centered ideology.” Many of them were from the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In a Truth Social post, trump claimed that the Smithsonian is “OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our country is” and “how bad slavery was.” If the trump administration’s efforts to change what is displayed at the Smithsonian’s many museums are successful, they have the potential to alter visitors’ perception of the U.S. and its history, says Levi: “It is vitally important that the history at those museums be told accurately. And now the way in which they are distorting the truth is simply spreading propaganda to people, and people will go to those institutions and walk away with the wrong lessons and a very blatant misunderstanding of history.”
Artifacts and other materials that reflect Black history are at risk as well. “If people think that the Smithsonian [and] the Park Service are going to distort history, tell things that are simply not true, that are lies, then they may become reluctant to give them their property and artifacts for preservation. Then what happens to them?” Levi asks. “We might ultimately then lose them, and that is really dangerous, because then our history is being erased if there is no custodian who will take them and ensure that they survive and live on for posterity.”
BEYOND TARGETING BLACK HISTORY, the trump administration has also implemented policies that have harmed Black communities. In October, the Department of Education (DOE) announced that a one-time addition of $495 million would be allocated to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to support their activities. These grants, however, came at the expense of other schools. At the same time, $350 million in funding was cut from minority-serving institutions, or schools that enroll a certain number of marginalized students. Predominantly Black institutions, which have high numbers of Black students, were impacted by this decision.
Additionally, the administration’s crusade against DEI has put at risk programs that support the educational and professional success of Black people. Last February, a “Dear Colleague” letter from the DOE claimed that “educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.” A coalition of education groups challenged that letter and the administration’s war on DEI, and last month the DOE dropped its case to revoke federal funding from schools that maintain DEI initiatives.
Coming as it does from trump, none of his administration’s assaults on the Black past, present, and future should be a surprise. Just weeks ago, trump posted a racist video to Truth Social that depicted former President Obama and his wife, Michelle, as apes dancing in a jungle, and later refused to apologize.
“It shows that trump is a figure who represents part of the country who never made their peace with racial equality, who never made their peace with the idea that Black people should be equal citizens, and the idea that Black history was a central part of U.S history,” says Singh. “We can see that in the actions of this administration.”
Attacks on Black history are nothing new, says Karsonya Wise Whitehead, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which founded Black History Month. “Black history has always been under attack. There’s always been attempts to not tell the complete and full story of our contributions in this country. America would not be America without the contributions and the stories and even the blood, the sweat, and the tears of the Black community.”
Years of teaching and learning about Black history in schools, museums, and cultural institutions, however, has produced an impact that won’t just go away, says Singh, and attempts to sanitize and erase Black history will face continued pushback. “It’s not true to our history, and it’s not true to the history we teach now in schools and colleges. And that really frustrates them [the trump administration and its allies], because as much as they want to change the narrative. They really don’t have the arguments; they don’t have the body of work.”
“You can try to push all of this out of the public view, but it’s not likely, and certainly hasn’t, so far, been successful,” Singh adds. The U.S. has been and is increasingly a multiethnic, multiracial country—characteristics and history that won’t, and can’t, be forgotten.
“This country belongs to all of us,” Whitehead says. “And I think that if there is one group that is truly representative of what it means to try to believe in the American dream and try to push for the American dream to be realized, even when America fails us time and time again, it is the Black community.” ///
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trump’s Orwellian Assault on Black History
donald trump is doing his best to control the past, and he is doing it with stunning clumsiness. The White House put out an executive order on March 27 with the Orwellian title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Among other claims, the order contends that “[o]ver the past decade,” America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Federal institutions are encouraged to purge historical characterizations of negative references. The order focuses on the Smithsonian Institution, which it charges with “improper ideology.” Vice President Vance, one of the 17 members of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, is tasked with toning it all down. And the Office of Management and Budget is charged with prohibiting future appropriations that stray from this hard line.
As an illustration of improper ideology, the order specifically mentions a current exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The exhibit, according to the order, represents that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
What an affront to America’s glorious past: claiming that race has been used to “maintain power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
One agency after another has fallen into line. An investigation by The Washington Post found that “edits on dozens of pages since trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division.”
The way this all works is that staffers at agencies, including the Defense Department and the Department of the Interior, compile lists of websites and then, perhaps using AI, comb through them for possibly ideologically incorrect phrases. Other staffers then scrub the sites and substitute pathetically anodyne language. Pure Orwell.
The Post reported that the National Park Service bowdlerized its own web page on the Underground Railroad to remove a prominent photo of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. In its place was Orwellian language characterizing the Underground Railroad as a splendid example of Black-white cooperation. The outcry was so great that the photo and reference to Tubman were restored.
There are actually two museums honoring Tubman operated by the National Park Service, one at her home in upstate New York, as well as a Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Maryland, as well as more than eight hundred separate sites marking actual locations along the Underground Railroad.
This history happened. How do you expunge that?
MUSEUMS HAVE BEEN SUBJECT to a host of cuts from trump’s destruction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, part of his general war on culture and learning. But what trump has done with the Smithsonian in particular is to expand his war on diversity, equity, and inclusion into a general effort to erase the realities of the Black experience in America since slavery.
A prime trump target is the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened on the National Mall in September 2016, as part of the Smithsonian. It is one of the most moving museums you will ever see, focused on the survival and triumph and dignity of a subjugated people, against impossible odds. It was not even two generations from the abolition of slavery to the Harlem Renaissance, which produced some of the 20th century’s greatest poetry, art, and literature, and just another generation until Dr. King and the Second Reconstruction.
The museum’s exhibits are rendered with joy and wit, as well as sorrow and anger. They celebrate Black culture in all of its forms, as well as the struggle for Black liberation. It is impossible to tone down the museum or the historical reality, any more than the Holocaust Museum could function if its leaders were instructed to prettify the facts of Hitler’s murder of European Jews.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was literally a century in the making. In 1915, on the 50th anniversary of the original Union victory parade of 1865 (which had excluded Black soldiers), black Union veterans were allowed to participate. The Black veterans group evolved into the National Memorial Association, which lobbied Congress to authorize the construction of a Negro Memorial.
For decades, resolutions were introduced in Congress, but nothing came of it. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the assassination of Dr. King, legislation authorized the construction of a national African American museum as part of the Smithsonian, but it was never funded. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) regularly used his power to block it.
Finally in 2003, Congress committed half of the $500 million needed to pay for the design and construction of the building and the exhibitions, all under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution. The balance, $250 million, had to be raised from nonfederal sources. Staff salaries and operations expenses are paid by the Smithsonian. The legislation creating the museum was signed by President George W. Bush.
The museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch III, was elevated in 2019 to secretary of the Smithsonian. In 2017, trump, who had sought Black support in the 2016 election, toured the new museum and was effusive in his praise.
“This museum is a beautiful tribute to so many American heroes—heroes like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, the Greensboro students, and the African American Medal of Honor recipients, among so many other really incredible heroes,” trump said, adding, “I am very, very proud of Lonnie Bunch.”
But that was then. Bunch made a comment in his 2019 memoir, A Fool’s Errand, that was critical of trump. And since then, he has been on trump’s personal vengeance list.
In his new role, Bunch was pressured into closing the Smithsonian’s own office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This followed trump’s January order requiring all federal institutions to end DEI programs.
The Smithsonian is not technically a federal agency. It’s a public-private entity with an independent board, well insulated from political meddling. But the White House could try to starve it into submission. About 53 percent of the Smithsonian’s total budget is paid by federal appropriations.
The Smithsonian joins a long list of worthy public entities that are on the verge of being destroyed by massive budget cuts. The list, insanely, includes the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, lifesaving programs under USAID, veterans’ health, and countless others.
All require heroic struggles to preserve and defend. But there is something uniquely sinister in trump’s efforts to expunge the history of slavery and segregation by censoring and starving museums.
Fully funding the Smithsonian is the responsibility of the Republican Congress. Ordering trump to spend all the money that Congress appropriates is the responsibility of the Supreme Court.
trump’s Orwellian actions are shameful. The actions, or inactions, of those who know better are even more shameful. This is how pure evil triumphs. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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