WASHINGTON – “Crazy.” “Ignorant.” “Dangerous.” “Wrong.”
Those are just some of the words visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture used this week to describe the idea that museums in the nation’s capital are focusing too much on “how bad slavery was,” as President Donald Trump put it last week.
The Trump administration has accused the Smithsonian Institution, which is nearly 180 years old and consists of 21 federally funded museums, of promoting “improper ideology.” To counter that supposed ideology, the administration has launched a “comprehensive internal review” of the institution to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
Or, as Trump said in an Aug. 19 Truth Social post, removing alleged “WOKE” exhibits in favor of more “Brightness” and “Success.”
A Trump aide leading that review later echoed the president’s comment, saying she had seen an “overemphasis on slavery” at museums.
“I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery,” Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump lawyer who is now his senior associate staff secretary, said on Fox News.
But visitors walking out of the world’s largest museum dedicated to African American history and culture, which includes artifacts like a Portuguese slave ship and abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s shawl, on Wednesday said that slavery rests at the core of the nation’s history and that its legacies are undeniable.
“It’s ignorant because the country was built on slavery. So how do you ignore that?” Maryland resident Gwendolyn Pavana told HuffPost.
“You can’t really put an emphasis on slavery. It happened to everybody,” added Marissa, a nurse from Maryland who declined to give her last name. “That’s not something that you could just simply take away. It’s not going to go anywhere, no matter what you try to do to hide it. There’s always going to be history about slavery.”
“He’s trying to take America back,” she said of Trump. “He doesn’t want people to move forward. He wants America to be what he remembered it to be when he was younger.”
America’s “original sin” has shaped its culture, economy and politics since its founding. It has contributed to racial inequality and influenced today’s hottest political debates, including over racial gerrymandering ahead of next year’s midterm elections. One of the most-watched Supreme Court cases looming over the country this year will hinge on whether to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, which was passed to protect Black Americans — who needed protection due to suppression during the post-slavery Jim Crow era.
Most Americans still agree, according to a 2019 Pew Research survey, that the legacy of slavery still affects Black Americans.
Willie Green, a retired tax consultant from Sacramento, California, said Trump’s review of D.C. museums smacked of “whitewashing history and rewriting it to be something that you want it to be, not necessarily what the truth is.”
“We’re at a sad chapter,” he told HuffPost. “I think we’re at a point of a dictator taking over the country, changing it to what he wants it to be.”
Keith Wych, a forklift operator from the Richmond, Virginia, area, called deemphasizing slavery in museums “crazy” and “wrong.” His wife, Delores, said the country has come a long way since slavery but that its legacy still lingers for their community.
“We’d like for us to be equally treated. Even at work, people act like it, but it’s not true. It’s still not true,” she added.
Kel Nagle, 77, and his wife, from Salisbury, Maryland, said they came to see the museum before the Trump administration censored or removed certain exhibits.
“I think it’s really dangerous to have them rewriting American history. Yeah, American history includes a lot of bad stuff, a lot of great stuff. I do believe we have a great country, and if we can get through this administration and get back to even moderate people, we’ll be OK again,” he said.
Trump’s review of Smithsonian museums comes amid his administration’s broader crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government, and in private institutions and businesses. Those efforts have included seeking to cancel funding to nonprofits that primarily service people of color and LGBTQ+ communities, as well as scrubbing federal websites that include data, research and history on those groups.
D.C.’s museums, which are free to the public, have already felt the effects of the crackdown. The National Portrait Gallery lost a show by an artist who refused to remove a painting of a transgender woman to appease Trump’s priorities. The National Museum of American History, meanwhile, last month drew condemnation for removing references to Trump’s two impeachments from a display about impeached presidents, though it later reversed course. The African American history museum also came under fire for returning civil rights-related artifacts to owners who had not requested them back. The museum called it standard practice, but critics alleged the move was tied to Trump’s review of D.C. cultural institutions.
A Smithsonian worker who requested anonymity to protect their job also told HuffPost earlier this month that “everyone is so scared” inside the organization.
“They’re trying to erase history before our very eyes,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate and the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from a Southern state, said on social media in response to the White House review.
Tobias Downs, a 45-year-old engineer from New Jersey who brought his teenage daughter to experience the African American history museum on Wednesday, said it was important to have a place where the real story can be told.
“When I was growing up, they were teaching us more about Christopher Columbus, and they never told us the full story of Christopher Columbus and his ventures and slaves. Let us have something where we can, like, find our history in one spot and be accurate,” he told HuffPost. “I don’t understand, what’s the big problem about learning what actually happened in history and not just wanting to dumb it down to try to be nice?”