President Trump’s latest diktat claims there is “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is in the crosshairs. First proposed by Black Civil War veterans, NMAAHC was more than 100 years in the making. The Smithsonian museum traveled a “long road to hard truth.”
Trump’s “corrosive ideology” is the hard truth about American history.
Writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin testified in support of legislation to establish the National Commission on Negro History and Culture.
Baldwin observed:
[Black] history … contains the truth about America. It is going to be hard to teach it.
[…]
I am the flesh of your flesh and bone of your bones; I have been here as long as you have been here – longer – I paid for it as much as you have. It is my country, too. Do recognize that that is the whole question. My history and culture has to be taught. It is yours.
[…]
Everyone has basic emotions of hate, fear, and love, and I think the whites in this country have used the machinery of propaganda very skillfully. You find blacks who want to know something about their history and you find whites who don’t understand or who are fearful. They will publicize this sort of thing as a hate gathering and a hate meeting, when actually it could possibly be a historical meeting that whites and blacks could learn from.
From the forced removal of indigenous people to the enslavement of Africans, “race-centered ideology” is woven into the fabric of the nation.
Signer of the Declaration of Independence and second President of the United States John Adams said:
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
Slaveholder Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. It is an objective fact that Jefferson was accompanied by his enslaved personal servant, Robert Hemmings.
It is an objective fact that more than 60 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence enslaved Black people.
It is an objective fact that the nation’s founding principles did not include Black people. It is a national shame that “our shared past” includes ratification of the U.S. Constitution that counted the enslaved as three-fifths of a person.
It is an objective fact that George Washington hounded self-emancipated Ona Judge until the day he died.
It is an objective fact that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings.
PHL Watchdog 