Churches fight back against Trump’s purge of Black history

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month targeting the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and other museums that tell the truth about U.S. history. And now Black church leaders are urging their congregations to fight back.

Trump signed the executive order on March 27 ordering Vice President JD Vance to purge the Smithsonian museums of exhibits that don’t align with Trump’s white supremacist worldview.

Rev. Robert Turner of the Empowerment Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland, told The Associated Press that his congregants have committed to becoming members of the museum. 

Turner walked 43 miles from his church to the Smithsonian on April 16 to pray and lay a wreath at the museum entrance as part of his monthly march to the White House to demand reparations.

“I laid my wreath down there to show solidarity with the museum and the history that they present every day,” Turner said.

Rev. Otis Moss III of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, has similarly organized his congregation. Moss has added the museum to the church’s annual budget and called on parishioners to become members of the museum.

“When people ask why you contributed to the museum, just tell them, ‘I go to a church that is unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian,’” he told congregants during an April 6 service.

And Rev. Jacqui J. Lewis of Middle Church in New York City and Bishop Timothy Clarke of the First Church of God in Columbus, Ohio, are making similar requests of their followers.

But over at the Smithsonian, key artifacts are already being removed.

According to Black Press USA, a group of artifacts from Dr. Amos Brown of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church that had been on loan to the museum since 2016 is now being returned. Among them is George Washington Williams’ “History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880,” one of the first books to document racism in the United States.

Brown, who participated in civil rights protests, said that the museum is also returning the Bible he used during demonstrations, which he had also lent to the museum.

Last week, House Democrats sent a letter to Vance protesting the planned purges. Members of the House Administration Committee, led by Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, noted that the National Museum of African American History and Culture was singled out in Trump’s executive order as the primary target of his actions.

“This flagrant attempt to erase Black history is unacceptable and must be stopped. The attempt to paper over elements of American history is both cowardly and unpatriotic,” they wrote.

Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has engaged in a full-fledged assault on civil rights, authoring executive orders to undo decades of laws and orders meant to address the worst vestiges of racism in the United States.

Trump has attempted to rewrite U.S. history from a white supremacist point of view, purging records of achievement by notable Black people like pioneering baseball player and veteran Jackie Robinson. Simultaneously, Trump has returned to his tactic of propping up the pro-slavery Confederacy by restoring the names of military bases that honor men who fought for slavery.

But Black churches are pushing back on Trump’s attempted whitewashing of U.S. history, and Americans of all backgrounds are expressing their revulsion.

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