By Zenitha PrinceAFRO Contributing Editor
Historical past, it’s stated, is written by the victors. And since Donald Trump gained the 2024 normal election, he’s been on a marketing campaign to rewrite America’s previous by erasing Black historical past. The most recent targets: a Nationwide Parks Service webpage detailing details about the life and legacy of Harriet Tubman, the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition and the library of the U.S. Naval Academy.
The reality about slavery – how America was constructed upon the backs of the Black enslaved; the distinctive and excellent contributions of African Individuals to varied features of American life; the continuing battle for fairness, inclusion, civil rights and justice–all have been topic to an Oval Workplace-led effort to Whitewash historical past and pander to the delusion of White victimhood.
Trump has pursued this aim by ordering the dismantling or elimination of all fairness, variety and inclusion insurance policies and practices. His government order in opposition to inclusion and variety has resulted in a placing of literature from federal companies and strain on personal sector entities to do the identical by threatening to chop federal funding and contracts.
The Nationwide Parks Service, in a latest try and adjust to Trump’s directive, edited a webpage on Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman in a method that appeared to downplay Tubman’s position and sanitize the tough realities of American slavery.
For instance, in line with The AP, the unique opening sentence referenced the railroad’s core position in “the resistance to enslavement via escape and flight.” Nonetheless, an edited model known as the railroad “one of the vital vital expressions of the American Civil Rights Motion” and described the way it “bridged the divides of race, faith, sectional variations and nationality.”
Civil rights leaders instantly decried the modifications. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., known as the transfer “an assault on fact, an try and erase historical past that will assist us enhance society immediately, a refusal to be uncomfortable and engaged in altering dangerous insurance policies and practices.”
The general public backlash prompted the NPS to stroll again the edits on April 8.
The controversy got here on the heels of reports that Trump had turned his sights on the Smithsonian Establishment, significantly the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, for what he deemed “improper ideology” within the depictions of American historical past.
In a March 27 government order, “Restoring Reality and Sanity to American Historical past,” the president empowered Vice President J.D. Vance to overview all of the Smithsonian’s properties, packages and shows to ban packages that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Individuals based mostly on race.”
Below the tough glare of the White Home, Kevin Younger, director of the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, which opened in 2016, introduced his resignation April 4. Younger had served as director since January 2021, succeeding Lonnie G. Bunch III after the latter turned secretary of the Smithsonian. Below Younger’s management, the museum launched a digital “Searchable Museum” within the fall of 2021 and kicked off its $350 million “Residing Historical past” marketing campaign the next 12 months.
Bunch addressed the president’s government order in a memo to Smithsonian employees, writing that the establishment “will proceed to showcase world-class reveals, collections, and objects, rooted in experience and accuracy.”
Historians, civil rights leaders and members of the Black group say they don’t seem to be shocked that Trump is focusing on establishments like NMAAHC, and a few expressed their anger together with his actions.
“I’m sick of this s–t,” Derrick Vines vented in frustration, “…every single day one thing new.”
“This museum is an excellent place. Wealthy in historical past. It ought to stay in any respect prices,” commented Sharron Malachi Watkins on the AFRO’s Fb web page. “He’s making an attempt to erase our historical past. He’s making an attempt to erase us. His hatred is deep rooted.”
Michael J. Hudson puzzled if different Black establishments could be focused. “Are they [going] to shut down HBCUs subsequent?”
In one other milepost alongside Trump’s highway to revisionist American historical past, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., on April 4 offered an inventory of practically 400 books faraway from its library to adjust to Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth’s directive to clean all traces of variety, fairness and inclusion.
Among the many listing of 381 books are Maya Angelou’s well-known memoir “I Know Why the Caged Fowl Sings,” and different volumes on histories of and points regarding the Holocaust, feminism, civil rights and racism, gender id and different focused matters. The Academy additionally reviewed its curriculum and sophistication choices – modifying some and slashing others.
The Pentagon’s overzealous efforts to adjust to Trump’s government order focusing on variety have stirred public indignation after the wholesale deletion of webpages devoted to baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s navy profession; Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Workers and the primary Black U.S. Secretary of State; Military Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, a Black recipient of the Medal of Honor; the Navajo Code Talkers and Japanese Individuals, amongst others.
AFRO reader Kelly F. Lebron Schwartz supplied her idea on why Trump and his cohorts had been attacking Black historical past, Black personages and the group generally.
“The phantasm of superiority can solely be maintained by veiling the brilliance of others, for when true greatness emerges, it casts shadows upon those that search to reign unchallenged,” she wrote. “Thus, the erasure of historical past and achievement turns into not an act of power, however a confession of worry—a silent admission that White supremacy is however a fragile mirage, sustained solely via the dimming of all different lights.”
