From Pulpit To Public Square

As part of his attack on anything that suggests Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Trump wants to create a version of American history that ignores the events of 1619 when indentured servants who later became victims of generational slavery were off-loaded by a Dutch-owned slave ship at Jamestown, Virginia.

Trump prefers a narrative that begins in 1776 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where an all-white assembly of delegates, many of whom were slave owners themselves, signed a Declaration of Independence complaining about their oppression at the hands of King George III and the British Parliament, even as they were silent about their own oppression of the Africans they were buying, selling, raping, and brutalizing.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has a specific design and intention and narrative that starts at the lowest level of the building where the history of slavery is told and displayed in graphic detail. The mood is dark, because there is no pleasant way to tell that story. There is a tree stump that appears to be polished. In fact, the shine of that stump is the result of the thousands of feet of African men, women, and children who were shuttled up and down, forced to stand there until sold to the highest white bidder.

This practice continued for 245 years. Africans and African Americans were sold to be field hands, house servants, midnight mistresses, and sex workers who were used as profit to reproduce new slaves so that slave owners would no longer need to buy them at market prices. The slaves cleared fields, planted and picked crops, and built plantation houses. They even built the United States Capitol and the White House in which Donald Trump now lives.

This is part of the story that Donald Trump does not want told. He wants Thomas Jefferson, but not his slave mistress Sally Hemmings. He wants George Washington, but not the slaves that built his Mount Vernon mansion. He wants Valley Forge and Yorktown, but he does not want Crispus Attucks, a black man who was killed by the British at the Boston Massacre of 1770, becoming the first person to die in pursuit of American independence. He does not want Salem Poor and Peter Salem, black soldiers that fought in the battle at Bunker Hill in 1775, or the all-black 1st Rhode Island Regiment that fought under George Washington at the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781.

President George W. Bush signed H.R. 1471 in 2003 which authorized the creation of this museum. The doors to the museum were opened in September of 2016 during the presidency of Barack Obama. Now, to celebrate the "golden age” of America, Donald Trump wants to erase the stories of African Americans.

Is it because of Trump's jealousy and contempt of Barack Obama that he has decided to remove all vestiges of black achievement in this country? Is that why he fired four-star General C. Q. Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Is that why he wants to reduce or remove funding for HBCUs? Is that why he wanted to remove references to Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from all federal government websites?

Both April Ryan the White House correspondent for The Griot and Nicole Hannah Jones who started the 1619 Project are sounding the alarm about Trump's intentions in the April 7,2025 edition of the BlackPressUSA Newswire. So, too, is Khalid Gibral Muhammad in the April 7, 2025 issue of U.S. News and World Report.

Trump signed an Executive Order on March 27 that he calls " Restoring Truth in American History”. A much better way of describing what Trump is doing is telling "a big, white lie."

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The Rev. Dr. Marvin A. McMickle is pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. He also served as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, New York, from 2011 to 2019.