Black Press USA has learned that Trump officials are dismantling Smithsonian exhibits depicting African American history and returning items to their rightful owners — starting with the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in exhibit.
“This president is a master of distraction and is destroying what it took 250 years to build. Here’s another distraction in his quest for attention, another failure of his first 100 days,” said North Carolina Rep. Alma Adams, responding to efforts to physically remove the Woolworth’s lunch counter exhibit from the National Museum of African American History and Culture — affectionately known as the “Blacksonian.”
The exhibit features the original lunch counter and highlights the story of four Black male students from North Carolina A&T who were brutally attacked after sitting at the whites-only counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960. When denied service, the students refused to leave. Their defiance ignited a wave of lunch counter sit-ins across the South and became a major flashpoint in the Civil Rights Movement.
Adams added, “We are long past the time when you can erase history — anyone’s history. You can take down exhibits, close buildings, take down websites, ban books, and try to change history, but we are long past that point. We will never forget!”
Black Press USA also has obtained a letter from the Rev. Dr. Amos Brown, longstanding civil rights leader and pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco — also known as the home church of former vice president Kamala Harris.
The letter notifies Dr. Brown that the museum is returning a Bible and George W. Williams’s “History of the Negro Race in America, 1618-1880,” one of the first books on racism in the U.S. Black Press USA has obtained emails from April 10 and April 15 confirming the transfer.
“Dear Reverend Brown, I wanted to alert you that the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) will be returning your Bible and book we borrowed for our exhibition, Segregation,” the email read in part.
These artifacts have been on display since the museum’s opening in September 2016. For Rev. Brown, they hold deep meaning.
“Those two books and the summary of my civil rights activism and my picture right there next to Medgar Evers, John Lewis and Fred Shuttlesworth in the desegregation of civil rights exhibit…,” Brown said. “That book [“History of the Negro Race in America”] inspired me before there were even African studies published. In my home, in that 3rd Street Baptist Church, we studied that book. The Bible — that’s my father’s Bible and the Bible I used in the Civil Rights Movement. When we went on demonstrations, we always had the Bible.”
While civil rights leaders are seeing their history returned behind the scenes, other actors are influencing the future of national memory.
Attorney Lindsey Halligan is reportedly urging Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties. According to a recent Washington Post article, Halligan told Trump the Smithsonian needs “changing,” and he has since ordered her to act.
Halligan stated, “I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history. We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.” That overemphasis, she argued, “just makes us grow further and further apart.”
April D. Ryan is Washington bureau chief for Black Press USA. This piece was originally posted on the Black Press USA Newswire. For more information, visit www.blackpressusa.com.
Trump would dismantle evidence of our history that not only document the negatives but in so doing dismantle the fact that we overcame them. But he is not the problem, those assisting him are. He could not succeed without their help. He may be the catalyst, but they are the means.