In the article below, Quintard Taylor, the founder of BlackPast.org, describes the recent attempts to marginalize African American history and why he believes those attempts will fail.
On March 27, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order titled โRestoring Truth and Sanity to American History.โ The order, which targeted what the President called โanti-American ideology,โ described the โconcerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nationโs history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.โ The entire order, which can be found here: Federal Register :: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, specifically targeted programs and policies at the Smithsonian Institution and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and frightened many scholars and supporters of African American history, presuming this is part of a larger national effort to โeraseโ Black history from the public sphere.
While we donโt doubt that is the intent of this executive order, especially when coupled with previous orders that called for the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from federal government agencies, we predict that it will fail. Attempts to propagandize American history, whether from the political right or the political left, to promote a particular agenda ultimately die under the weight of their own contradictions. This is not to say, however, that these attempts donโt have an often chilling impact on those who believe they are targeted.
Black history will not be erased precisely because American society is not hopelessly racist and irredeemably flawed. If anything, it shows by example after example, just the opposite, that once injustice is exposed, much of American society pushes back.ย We need not go far back in time for an example. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion effort was advanced by protests in response to the Memorial Day 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. By conservative estimates, these protests involved more than 26 million Americans in 2,000 cities and towns in every state in the United States, making these the most widespread protests around one issue in the history of the nation. Rather than being part of a movement to promote a โdivisive race-centered ideology,โ DEI efforts were often hastily expanded by those who sought to โdo somethingโ to atone for George Floydโs tragic and unnecessary death.
Or one can go back to the founding of the United States in 1776 and the greatest debate that divided the colonies at that time, the issue of slavery. The Founding Fathers โpuntedโ the issue down the road with a series of compromises that eventually led to the Civil War. During that 86-year period, Black and white abolitionists, men and women, mounted a compelling case against slavery, which was eventually embraced by the Abraham Lincoln Administration. In his second inaugural address, where his โbind up the nationโs woundsโ is often quoted, he also said, โIf God wills thatโฆevery drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, โโthe judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.โโ
Some people today seem to be horrified not by the often brutal and senseless violence inflicted on African Americans during slavery and continuing and often intensifying in the Jim Crow era but by the reminders of that violence in the history taught in public and private schools. Some Nashville parents, for example, object to the discussion of school integration in the 1960s because it is upsetting to their children. The compromise here should be age-appropriate discussions, but we cannot simply erase painful events because we feel they upset our children. Nor can we pick and choose the appropriate event to discuss because it fits our narrative of American exceptionalism. Can we, for example, discuss the heroic sacrifices of the more than one million Black women and men who served in the armed forces in World War II while ignoring the racism they faced when they returned to civilian life?
While echoes of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 continue to resonate through that city, there is a continuing debate over whether and how to recognize the few surviving victims or compensate them for their loss. The violence itself, however, was never met by resignation by the local Black community.ย Within hours, Buck Franklin (father of the prominent historian John Hope Frankin) and his associates had set up a law office to battle for justice for the victims. ย When one survivor was offered money to leave Tulsa for the North, his response was, โIt is true thatโฆ they have destroyed our homes, wrecked our schoolsโฆand murdered our peopleโฆย But they have not touched our spiritโฆย I came here and built my fortune with that SPIRIT.ย I shall reconstruct it here with that SPIRIT, and I expect to live on and die here with it.โ The entire Black community began (without government or private help) to rebuild itself so that within a decade, the Black Wall Street that the mob thought it had destroyed was back. The Tulsa story is one of death and destruction.ย It is also one of resilience and rebirth.
The grand example of societal transformation was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We cannot forget the centuries-long racist policies not only across the South but across the entire nation that prompted this movement. We also cannot forget those who lost their lives in that effort, including Dr. Martin Luther King, who was assassinated in April 1968.ย It would be naรฏve, however, to ignore the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that ripped apart the foundation of overt racism in the United States. We could go on with example after example of African American struggle and achievement that created the United States that we know today.
Black history is interwoven into the American story. It is this story of courage, struggle, adversity, and achievement, often in the face of overwhelming odds, that is at the core of contemporary American identity.ย It is impossible today to tell the American story without including the Black American story. That approach has been tried before, throughout the 19th century and even into the mid-20th century.ย Over that period, a small number of historians, black and white women and men, pushed back and chose to tell the truth, often at professional and personal peril, against a much larger group of historians who chose to ignore or denigrate Black history.ย Their numbers grew over the decades and continued to grow into the 21st Century. When I took my PhD. exams in 1977, I read 300 books on Black History to prepare. Today, a graduate student is exposed to 20 times that number. This is just one manifestation of the expanding role of Black history in the national historical narrative.
Propaganda, regardless of its goal, never eclipses actual, factual history. We know the previous efforts at erasure have failed. We also know that with institutions like NMAAHC, organizations such as the 110-year-old Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), BlackPast.org, our 18-year-old, 10,000-page encyclopedia on African American history, and the efforts of thousands of local organizations and individuals from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, who diligently work to preserve Black history, we predict this one will fail as well. Ideology, regardless of its intent, can never erase the truth.
