On the cusp of America's 250th, communities push to reclaim their narratives

As the Trump administration pushes to rewrite the nation’s history, communities across the country are pushing back against who gets to tell it.

“It’s a push we are witnessing not only on the streets of Minneapolis, but in efforts to resist an escalating series of executive orders to cancel exhibits at national museums, rename national parks and censor school curricula,” said ACoM Co-Director Sandy Close, introducing a briefing highlighting these efforts as July 4th approaches.

Nor are these orders limited to this second administration. Two in 2020 alone include Executive Order 13950 (“Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping), restricting federal agencies, contractors, and grantees including museums and schools from using frameworks associated with systemic racism or “divisive concepts,” and Executive Order 13958 (Establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission), signaling federal pressure on schools, museums and cultural institutions to abandon critical historical narratives in favor of a “patriotic” version of American history.

“We’re nearing the 250th anniversary of the United States, and it requires all of us to ask a fundamental question: Who gets to decide what this country remembers, and who gets to decide what it forgets or erases?” said Ann Burroughs, CEO of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) and chair of the International Board of Amnesty International.

For Burroughs, the institutional stakes hit close to home. 

The Japanese American National Museum was founded to document the incarceration of more than 125,000 Japanese Americans during World War II: “They were imprisoned without due process. Communities were destroyed. They were dispossessed, and essentially had to rebuild themselves,” she said, adding that the museum exists “to ensure that the history of the incarceration of Japanese Americans is never forgotten, but also that it never happens to anybody else.”

As museums face federal pressure, “What we’re seeing today are the echoes of that history,” Burroughs continued: “We’ve faced incredible pressures as museums to alter interpretation, avoid histories, conform to political expectations. We’ve also been further weaponized by having our funding threatened … When civic space is shrunk, one of the first things that goes is First Amendment rights.”

Margaret Huang, senior fellow for The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Human Rights and former CEO of Southern Poverty Law Center, highlighted another field where this civic pressure is mounting: public monuments.

Despite the Civil War being fought largely in the South and along the East Coast, “there are Confederate memorials in nearly every state in the country … and these memorials were put into place not after the war but “60, 80 years later, when the narrative of white supremacy was very much at the forefront in fighting back against the Civil Rights  Movement,” as activists nationwide demanded that Jim Crow laws be overturned, she explained.

Though over 100 Confederate memorials have been removed since 2015, over 2,000 still remain nationwide.