When entrepreneur Dawn V. Carr decided to donate tens of thousands of dollars to the then-forthcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture in the 2010s, she did so with the hope that within its walls she would see the stories of people who looked like her told in their totality, pulled from the sidelines and given the space they deserve.
"When you don't see yourself in these places, in these spaces, that often, you can feel like you're not part of it. You are on the side. You are relegated," she told Salon in a phone interview, adding: "It's just the point where you have a space where you can do that — that was always really important to me."
For Carr, the completed NMAAHC accomplished that. Nearly 10 years removed from its 2016 opening, she said she still feels the overwhelming sense of "appreciation" for her ancestors' strength and resilience when walking through the museum's "Door of No Return," meant to evoke the final stopping point on the West African coast before enslaved Africans began their forced journey across the Atlantic during the Middle Passage. But following an executive order from President Donald Trump targeting the Smithsonian Institution, Carr said she's disappointed that it now faces the prospect of having to change its telling of Black history to comply with a mandate that labels it divisive.
"To somehow feel like there are parts of who we are as America that we somehow can't talk about, I think, is more of an insult to America than anything else," she said.
"You can't make America great again if you don't acknowledge all the things that America is," Carr added.
The NMAAHC was one of three Smithsonian Institution museums named in President Donald Trump's late March executive order seeking to curb the Institution's independence and eliminate what the president deems its improper inclusion of divisive ideologies, particularly around race. Supporters like Carr and museum visitors have rejected Trump's claims that the museums are divisive and anti-American. Some public historians, left reeling from DOGE-spearheaded cuts to federal humanities and arts funding, view the order as an affront to the scholarship and nuance that undergirds the institutions' evidence-based tellings of American history.
"It's sickening, it's terrifying, it's frustrating to have spent decades and [have] everything that my profession and my colleagues have understood and known as truth be attacked," Leah Glaser, a professor of history and public history at Central Connecticut State University, told Salon in a phone interview.
The order, she argues, displays a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how museums operate and their purpose and represents an attack on people's ability to have a dialogue and think critically for themselves, without the influence of politicians and media.
Glaser said she predicts she and other historians will have to watch their vocabulary going forward as the Trump administration continues to apply financial pressure on them to conform to his policies. Other than that, however, she said she can't see historians at the Smithsonian or elsewhere capitulate to the president's demands because of the breadth of scholarship and knowledge uncovered over the last fifty years alone, much of which flies in the face of the narrative the order seeks to push.
"I still don't see how it's possible to return to something that never was," Glaser said.
"Myself and [my] colleagues, we're still trying to process and figure out how to go forward," she added. "But I think that the only way we can go forward is to do what we have been trained to do."
Called "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," Trump's order accuses the Smithsonian of having recently come "under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology." It instructs the vice president to make sure the institution adheres to the new policies, including by "seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties," and strips funding from exhibits or programs that "degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy."
The order singled out an exhibit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in part, for stating that race is a "human invention," referenced a long-since-removed graphic on aspects of "white culture" once included in the Nation Museum of African American History and Culture "Talking About Race" online portal, and mandated that the forthcoming American Women's History museum does not "recognize men as women in any respect" — a nod to Trump's crusade against transgender and gender non-conforming Americans.
But Jennifer Tucker, a professor of history at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, told Salon that the characterization of the institution and its museums in Trump's order does not reflect "an image of a museum that I recognize."
The Smithsonian museums and others, she said in a phone interview, create opportunities for richer and more inclusive dialogue by offering varied cultural, historical or artistic interpretations of the objects within them that don't just privilege the perspective of the elites — a quality she said is more valuable now than ever. She drew a distinction between their use of "memory" and "history," describing the former as a reflection of what people want the past to be — highlighting some stories while omitting others — and the latter as an evidence-based recounting of events rooted in scholarship, critical analysis and accuracy, aiming to present the past as it happened.
Both, she said, work in tandem to provide museum visitors with a more nuanced understanding, "where history is grounded in factual reality, while memory offers insight into how those facts are lived, felt and remembered across time." The initiative behind the NMAAHC and other Smithsonian projects, for example, "was really fundamental to helping us understand the broader truth of the past," Tucker explained.
But the order and budget cuts, she added, are part of a much broader effort to undermine the foundation of knowledge in the U.S.
"It's really about an erasure that is a great mistake, that undermines the foundation of knowledge, discovery and education, and I would say democracy or people's history," she said.
William S. Walker, a public historian and associate professor at SUNY-Oneonta in New York, told Salon that the Smithsonian has been swept up in culture war attacks on public history before, particularly in the 80s and 90s. The mid-1990s controversy over a nuanced exhibit around World War II and the Enola Gay, the bomber aircraft deployed in the United States' nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, that the Smithsonian later canceled is one such example.
But the "scale and intensity" of the attacks on the Smithsonian at this moment, the "A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum" author said, exceed those prior controversies because the attacks are coming from the executive branch rather than Congress or the broader public.
That top-down pressure, coupled with ongoing cuts to funding streams from the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Institute of Museum and Library Services, leaves the Smithsonian and other museums vulnerable, Walker added.
"There is always the danger — when you have this kind of pressure — of self-censorship, and, you know, that's real," he said. "It is something that I think museums and other historical organizations are going to have to be vigilant against: not engaging in self-censorship preemptively but instead staying true to their principles, their professional practice as good public historians."
Despite the uncertainty and the pressure coming from the executive branch both through policy and DOGE-recommended funding cuts, however, Walker said he remains confident that Smithsonian and other public historians will stay true to their principles: doing "good history" by reading and including multiple perspectives, collaborating with members of the community and consultations with other stakeholders. He recalled a recent trip to New York City with Cooperstown Graduate Program students to visit the array of historical institutions that helped him maintain faith in the industry.
"That was energizing and galvanizing," he said. "I saw people still doing good work. So it hasn't stopped. Good public history has not stopped, and it will continue."
The Smithsonian appears to share that sentiment. In an internal email obtained by Courthouse News last week, Secretary Lonnie Bunch told staffers that the institution would "remain steadfast" in its mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans.
“As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges and triumphs," Bunch wrote.
The Smithsonian Institution did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
