Front Burner - Trump, the Smithsonian, and the battle over U.S. history

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

American history has always been contested, but recent decisions by U.S. President Donald Trump to reshape the way it’s taught and remembered have put museums, schools, and memorials squarely in the crosshairs. Earlier this year, Trump passed an executive order that called for the removal of what he referred to as “divisive, race-centered ideology” from the nation’s museums. He’s targeted the Smithsonian Museum in particular, calling it “out of control” and “woke”, criticizing it for focusing too much on teaching the history of slavery. What does it mean to discourage the teaching of slavery and Jim Crow laws in a country that practiced chattel slavery for nearly 250 years, and had been led by at least 12 Presidents who themselves owned slaves?Bryan Stevenson is a civil rights lawyer, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir ‘Just Mercy', and creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. He joins the show to talk about Trump’s attacks on American history, and the enduring legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial terror in the United States.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hi, everyone. I'm Jamie Plesson. Well, we want the museums to treat our country fairly. We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner, which is what many of them, not all of them, but many of them are doing. So that was, of course, U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office talking about American history and his feeling that major American museums were telling an unflattering version of the American story. Trump focused his critique on the Smithsonian, which is a network of museums that together serve as the U.S.'s de facto national museum system.

He said on social media that, quote, the Smithsonian is out of control. Everything discussed is about how horrible our country is, how bad slavery is. was and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been. Trump has instructed a team of lawyers to review the museum's collections to ensure that they are telling a sufficiently redemptive version of American history. Incursions from this administration into American history, the challenging or whitewashing of complicated stories and eras in the country's history is not new. Earlier this year, Trump passed an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to

American history that called for the removal of what he referred to as, quote, divisive race-centered ideology. So what does all of this mean in a country that practiced chattel slavery for nearly 250 years? A country home to at least 12 presidents who themselves owned slaves, a country where black people earned the right to vote and work just 60 years ago. There aren't many people that are suited to answer those questions than Brian Stevenson. He's an American lawyer, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Just Mercy, which was made into a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Fox. He also oversell the creation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery,

Alabama. The museum is the country's largest memorial to the history of lynching and racial terror in the United States. Today, Brian joins the show to talk about working as a custodian of history through this Trump moment. and why there have always been wars over the teaching of American history. Brian, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. It's a real privilege to have you here today. Great to be with you. So let's begin with the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture,

which is part of the Smithsonian Network, as I understand, and is in many ways the country's leading institution of African American history. The Smithsonian Network is, home to nearly 157 million items. Can you talk to me about these institutions, the role that they play in public life and your relationship to them? Well, I think the first thing for people to understand

is that throughout most of America's history, we did not have a museum that focused on the African-American experience. This museum, the African-American Museum of History and Culture, is less than 10 years old. It took a lot of work by both private and public companies. contributions to create the space because throughout our history, we didn't think it important

to have a space that talked about the lives of the millions of black people who contributed so critically to the economic, social, and political life of this nation. And so for it to be attacked less than 10 years after it was even created, says something about the long-term discomfort we've had in acknowledging the history of racial injustice. In America, in America, And I think part of what's frustrating when I hear the president and others attacking the Smithsonian and the African American history there, and that that museum is actually unlike most other history museums in that a substantial portion of it is dedicated to black achievement, to black success. When you go to the museum in Washington, you can take the elevator to the floor and spend all of your time looking at Michael, Jackson's glove and Michael Jordan's shoe. You can focus on the achievement of great athletes and Magic Johnson and all of these famous black athletes. You can focus on Barack Obama and the

political achievements of many African Americans. Oprah Winfie has a theater named after her. And that's a much bigger part of that museum than you would typically find in a history museum. Most history museums don't feel the need to do that. And so it's kind of, in my judgment, inaccurate, to emphasize the parts of the museum, which focus on the kind of history that the president seems to be provoked by. Of course, I actually think we need museums just on slavery, just on lynching, just on segregation, because that's the part of our history we've done such a poor job educating people about. You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about is why museums as a target right now, like, of course, folks in the mega world long-branded

the Second Trump administration as an opportunity to really remake the country, right? As a kind of cultural revolution, we have done episodes on the Republican Party's book banning program. For 15,000 books have been banned across the United States in the last four years, forbidden in 43 states outlawed in over 400 school districts. The censorship targets mostly books about race or racism with people of color or LGBTQ plus topics. And the censoring of the works of African. American authors like James Baldwin and Tony Morrison, we've talked about the creation of so-called patriotic curriculum. But why museums now, this focus on these sites of influence and memory?

I think it's in part because many of these institutions have relied on federal support, to be vibrant, to be sustainable. And it's an area where if you're running the government, like it's your personal kingdom, like you have all the power. It's an area where you feel like you can be disruptive in ways that you can't say maybe in entertainment and filmmaking and other kinds of storytelling. And so museums are vulnerable in that way. If they have been dependent on federal support, I think it's the same reason why this administration has been targeting public media. It's because it has had a very strong relationship to federal government support. And so if you're looking for things to kind of beat up on these kinds of institutions are vulnerable. Also, museums and

cultural spaces have long been trying to rectify to kind of address the omission of honest teaching of history in our educational system. Teachers and textbook writers and school boards have long avoided talking honestly about what happened to indigenous peoples when Europeans came to this continent, have long avoided talking honestly. about slavery and the legacy of slavery, about Reconstruction, about terror violence and lynching, even about Jim Crow and segregation. And so many cultural institutions have tried to respond to that miseducation that happens in our public schools and private schools. And so we have more of them trying to address this issue than you might, in a society where that content was

baked into the curriculum, baked into the educational process. That's never been true in the United States. And so cultural institutions have been trying to fill the gap, which again makes them more of a target if you're trying to eliminate knowledge, trying to ban understanding, trying to prevent people from talking about the parts of our history that are difficult and challenging. What strikes me is how much this moment echoes earlier chapters of American history. So I know that after the Civil War, there came this period historians called Reconstruction that was all about creating this multiracial democracy, but then there was this backlash to that

that ushered in this period called the redemption that involved the return of racial terror, the rise of the KKK, right, laws that separated people based on race. And that period also involved this rewriting of American history groups like the daughters of the Confederacy. They're the ones who covered the southern landscape with memorials for Confederate leaders and soldiers. They use their fundraising and lobbying skills to pressure local governments into erecting monuments in prominent public spaces like courthouses and state capitals. Which popularized this historical narrative that recast the civil wars being about states' rights and not about protecting slavery. The lost cause was a national propaganda campaign to misrepresent what the civil war was actually about. The main tenets of the lost cause are that the Confederacy was fighting for state's rights, not slavery,

that slaves had great working conditions, were loyal to their masters, and often fought for the Confederacy, portraying slave owners as kind and southerners in general as more steeped in Christian values in order to make the case that they were fighting for a just cause and only lost because they were outnumbered. That belief still informs the way that millions of Americans understand the Civil War today. And so when you think about that legacy and the long effort to censure, control, and whitewash history, what are you thinking about, what comes to mind for you? Well, we're in the midst of a narrative struggle. I mean, I think that this is a critical moment in our nation's history where we are in the middle of a narrative battle.

And I think there are people who are preaching what I call the politics of fear and anger to kind of govern through fear and anger. And the problem with that perspective, in my view, is that when you look at world history over the last century, the worst moments of human history had been when we have allowed ourselves to be governed by fear and anger. When you allow yourself to be governed by fear and anger, you start tolerating things you should never tolerate. You start accepting things you should never accept. That's how the Holocaust took place in Europe, this narrative of fear and anger. It's how the Rwandan genocide

took place 30-some years ago. Narratives of fear and anger spread across that country. So we're in the middle of a narrative struggle in America, and history is central to that. And I think that's what people have to understand about what happened after the civil war. I actually think we get the Civil War wrong. The great evil of slavery for me was not the human bondage, the forced labor, the violence, the assault, all of that was horrific. The greatest evil of slavery in this country was the narrative we created to justify enslavement. Because people who enslaved other people didn't want to think of themselves as indecent or unchristian or immoral. And how do you think of yourself as decent immoral when you see a black mother's being pulled away from their

screaming children, knowing that those mothers will never see those children again because you've sold them. When you see people being brutalized and bloodied and beaten, well, you need a narrative to help you reckon with that. And so we created a false narrative in America that black people aren't as good as white people, that black people are less evolved, less human, less decent, less capable. And that narrative of racial difference was the great evil of slavery. And the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war because those ideas of racial hierarchy, they persisted. And that narrative prevailed after the Civil War. And so even though we had a 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection, a 15th Amendment, which guaranteed

the right to vote, our courts refused to enforce those amendments for a century. We had a Ku Klux Klan Act passed by the Congress in the 1860s to ban mob violence, and our Supreme court overturned that law and said, no, states' rights. States are going to be in control of these things. And that's what led to 100 years of terror violence where thousands of black people were pulled out of their homes, beaten, drowned, tortured, lynched on courthouse lawns. And the demographic geography of this country was shaped by terror violence. And people don't know that because we haven't talked about it. Six million black people fled the American South during the first half of the 20th century. The black people in Chicago and Cleveland,

in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland, didn't go to these communities as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities. They went to these communities as refugees and exiles from terror violence in the American South. Many of them left land that they owned. And they had to forfeit their opportunity to create wealth for their children and great-grandchildren and grandchildren. And so we have a wealth gap in this country based on race that is rooted in this violence. But that's all evidence of a narrative struggle. And the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that got reinforced every time we tolerated mob violence toward black people, the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that got codified in Jim Crow laws and segregation, that presumption of dangerousness and guilt,

it stayed with us. We tore down the Jim Crow laws. We had a heroic civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, but that narrative persisted. And that's why George Floyd was killed on the streets of Minneapolis. That's why Brianna Taylor was killed in Kentucky. That's why Ahmed Arbery was shot while he was jogging in Georgia, because they were burdened with a presumption of dangerousness and guilt. And in 2020, people were forced to reckon with that, and it's that reckoning that has now so provoked many people in power, and they're just trying to erase it all. And so we're in this narrative struggle. And I think the thing that I'm trying to emphasize for people is that you can't go to the doctor and tell your doctor, oh, don't tell me

if I have high blood pressure and diabetes if you want to get well. If you're not willing to hear the truth, you're not going to get the treatment you need to get better. And I think the health of this nation, the future of this nation, is at stake if we allow this commitment to silencing and erasure and ignorance and banning to prevail. And I tell people, I'm not talking about slavery and lynching and segregation

because I want to punish America. I want to liberate America. I think there's something better waiting for us. I think there's something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, and it's waiting for us. But we won't get there if we don't have the honesty, the commitment to reckon with this history. And that's the tension. That's the struggle we're in the middle of in this country.

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of course as we've mentioned you oversee the lynching memorial and and for those who aren't familiar it's this really beautiful facility there are over 800 steel columns that hang from the ceiling each representing a county more than 4,000 names are engraved the date of murder listed with a county where they died the reasons chilling drinking from a white man's well striking to protest low wages yes exactly. If you're black and you go into town, there's so many ways that you can make a mistake that could cost you your life. Can you just describe some of the stories that the facility houses and why they're so important to you, what compelled you to want to build it? Well, there are actually three structures. The National Memorial is where we focus on the history of lynching. Thousands

of people were lynched in this country. It was mob violence. It was lawlessness. We just did not enforce the rule of law throughout most of the 20th century and parts of this country. that had large black populations, which was traumatizing and horrific. It's what kind of enforced segregation. I grew up in a community where black kids couldn't go to the public school, so I started my education in a colored school. I grew up in a community where none of the adults had high school degrees, not because they're not smart or hardworking,

but there were literally no high schools for black people in our county when my dad and his generation were coming up. And it took the rule of law to respond to that. The second institution we have is the Legacy Museum, from enslavement to mass incarceration. And there we talk about the history of slavery and the legacy of slavery and how that evolved into that era of lynching and segregation

and then ultimately mass incarceration, where we have these horrific disparities in our current criminal justice system based on that presumption of dangerousness and guilt. And the third space is Freedom Monument Sculpture Park because I don't think we have done enough to educate people about the harms and the legacy of slavery. And I think so many of the people who are embracing or supporting or being silent in the face of these policies are just not informed. They're ignorant of this history. I mean, we have Holocaust museums all over the world.

And I think we need them. If we are committed to never again tolerate the kind of horrific violence we saw in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, then we have to be mindful of what that happened. And in Germany, you can't go 200 meters without seeing markers and monuments that acknowledge the history of the Holocaust. The memorial sits in the center of the city. There's a reckoning with that history. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the Nazis. And we've embraced Germany as a result of their reckoning.

We trust them because there's been that reckoning. We have not done that in the United States. And so I believe it is essential. It is a priority to create a new landscape that deals with this history. And to be honest, it's heartbreaking to hear someone say something like we're talking too much about how bad slavery was. It's so fundamentally ignorant about that institution. The 13 million Africans that were abducted and came. kidnapped and taken across the Atlantic Ocean were crime victims. They were victimized,

abduction and kidnapping. Then they were brutalized for 246 years. And I don't think any elected official would think it appropriate to say, are those people who are raped, those people who are assaulted, those people who are victimized today should stop complaining about their victimization. Those people, we wouldn't say to people who are Jewish, stop talking about the Holocaust. That happened a long time ago. We wouldn't say to Americans in New York City, stop talking about what happened on 9-11. Get over it. Let's not focus on how bad that was. We would be deeply offended by that kind of narrative, that kind of idea. And yet, this administration says to the descendants of 10 million black people who endured 246 years of immense suffering and constant sorrow through

enslavement, stopped talking about how bad things were. And I just think we have to challenge that. I can tell you that at our sights, we will not retreat one inch from talking honestly about this history. Because if we don't talk about it, I think future generations will be burdened by the same presumption of dangerousness and guilt that we are still burdened with today. And I don't want that for my children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I don't want that for anybody's children. Eight years ago, this month, hundreds of white supremacists took to the streets in Charlottesville. Virginia chanting anti-Semitic slogans like, You Will Not Replace Us, the Unite the Right rally was an international incident.

You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us! Two protests come after hundreds of white supremacists, some giving Nazi salutes, held a torch-lit rally yesterday at the University of Virginia, to protest against a decision to remove the statue of a Confederate Civil War general. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides. But this week, the man who helped organize that March tweeted, quote, eight years ago, you were an extremist if you protested being replaced by immigrants. Now it's official White House policy never give up. The former leader of the proud boys has said,

quote, things we were doing and talking about in 2017 that were taboo. They're mainstream now. And just when you look back at 2017, which wasn't actually that long ago, when that rally took place, it feels so different now. And what do you think has? really changed between then and now, and what does that shift tell us about sort of the mainstreaming of radical ideas in the U.S. today? No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think this topic, the way we have dealt with race in this country, to overcome 400 years of tolerating racial inequality and racial injustice, it's going to require

kind of vigilance. Many of us were very critical of the president when he talked about good people on both sides in that moment in 2017. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. These were people, white men holding torches, who marched onto a public university, shouting slogans that were anti-Semitic and bigoted and racist. And there were people who were trying to legitimate that, trying to justify that. So you know what? It's fine.

You're changing history. You're changing culture. And you had people, and I'm not talking about. about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And I just think, until we commit to rejecting categorically the kind of bigotry, the kind of violence, the kind of antisemitism that those men represented, we will not get what we're trying to go. And what's perverse to me about it is this administration is using a pretense of, of being committed to ending anti-Semitism

by restricting funding of schools and overtaking these academic institutions while accommodating the worst forms of overt bigotry that we've seen manifest in our recent history. A woman died in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a result of the conduct of those people. And so I do think this is a critical moment in our history. We're going to have to make really important

decisions. And I have to say, I'm actually, frankly, deeply disappointed by all of those people who over the last 40 years claim to be on a journey of reconciliation, claim to be wanting to get to a better place. We integrated the schools. We have black athletes dominating football teams at the University of Alabama and Georgia and Texas and all of these people come out and cheer the success with these black athletes. We're claiming, we're post-racial. We're making all of these claims. And yet, tolerating these narratives that are legitimating racial hierarchy, legitimating white supremacy, legitimating animus against people of color, and shame on this country for our silence and complicity, not just the progressive people. It's actually these Republicans and others

who voted to change the names of military bases just three years ago and are now allowing this president to restore the names of Confederate traders who fought against the United States. who believed in the morality of slavery, who believed in white supremacy until their death. And those names are being put back on. And now we have an army that's majority non-white, where we want young people to serve on basis that honor people who didn't believe that black people or brown people were the equal of white people, who shouldn't be in uniforms, who believe that they should be subservient, shouldn't have a gun, shouldn't have a leadership role.

People say, if I've been alive during slavery, I would have been an abolitionist. Most people would say that in this country. People would say, if I've been alive in the 30s and 40s, I would have been fighting against lynching. Everybody today would claim to have been on Dr. King's side when he was marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Well, you can't claim to be on the right side of history during enslavement, during lynching, during the civil rights movement,

and then be on the wrong side of history today, to be silent today about this president talking about, or we're talking too much about slavery, to be silent today and allowing people to come in speaking and preaching anti-Semitism and legitimating that. You cannot be silent about that today and have any alignment with those movements historically that have made this country better. And the greatness of this nation, the strength of this nation has been built on the backs of truthful, honest, dedicated Americans who fought against racial injustice. And that's the question we're going to have to ask ourselves

today? Are we fighting against this kind of racial injustice, this kind of ignorance? I've seen a lot of people compare this moment to the McCarthy era where universities' artists, institutions were treated with suspicion for fear that they were communist sympathizers. It was a time of fear of self-censorship. And it's worth remembering that black intellectuals and activists were also caught up in this climate. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, was actually indicted in 1951 for his peace activism, though the charges were dismissed. Paul Robeson had his passport revoked and his career destroyed. Langston Hughes was subpoenaed to testify before Congress about his writing. And later in the 60s, figures like

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael faced years of FBI surveillance and intimidation under the banner of fighting communism. Every time King made a move to a different city, they were agents who were sent out by the FBI to monitor and surveil him. They were wiretapping. They had bugs in his hotel rooms. I mean, everything he did, they were following. What parallels are you seeing between that moment and today? I think throughout our history, when people have tried to advance a vision of America

that is just where there is racial equality that doesn't accept bigotry, we've used threats and violence to intimidate them from doing that. And this dates back to the time of enslave. when it was against the law for any person, black or white, in many states in this country, to be in possession of abolitionist materials. The way they wanted to manage the powerful argument that slavery was wrong was to ban anyone from having literature or writings that made that point.

And you could be in prison if you were white with that. You could be executed if you were black in possession of these materials. After the Civil War, it was that same threat. We rounded people up. We put them in jails and prisons. Convict leasing was a way to intimidate, to menace, to threaten. The lynchings that took place that were sometimes witnessed by thousands of people, bankers and teachers, it wasn't the clan. These were the leading members of society that would come out and eat deviled eggs and drink whiskey while black men and women were being tortured on the courthouse law.

And that was an effort to intimidate people. And as you rightly described during the Civil Rights Movement, it was just a few months after Dr. King, 25 years old, is leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott that he begins to be the target of all of these criminal prosecuted, criminal thoughts. He was first arrested for driving, allegedly driving 30 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone by the Montgomery Police. They thought that arrest and prosecution and the threat of imprisonment

would kind of deter people. And so that strategy of using the power of punishment, using the threat of incarceration and victimization and violence, has always been part of the story. We're seeing it as part of the story today. And I just think it's so much for me a marker of unhealthy our government is right now, that we're sending mass agents across the country to abduct people were thought to be undocumented.

We're doing it under cover of darkness. We're covering our faces as we engage in these abductions that we're sending massive troops into cities that haven't asked for those trips to be an intimidating presence, that if we just show up with a gun and people will act the way we want them to act. And I just think the lesson of history

is that showing up with a gun with power is not going to be sufficient to cause people to be silent about the things that they believe. Their convictions, their truths are going to come forward, even if you threaten and intimidate. And that's the true story of those great leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, they burned her office down. She just moved to a place and became even more compelling, more prolific, more persuasive, a Dr. King, all of those who were killed during the Civil Rights Movement, nobody ever turned around because they were being threatened. We're marching to our state capital to dramatize to our nation and to the world.

determination to win first-class citizenship. Hundreds of black demonstrators took to the streets demanding the right to vote, and they were met with violence and brutal beatings from police and state troopers. The Bloody Sunday was followed by two more marches and ultimately prevailed, and I think that's what we have to hold on to as people make these threats, as people make these gestures of intimidation, make these gestures of violence. You just cannot back down from that. And I think that's the powerful thing about human history.

is that when you commit to truth, when you commit to honesty, when you commit to justice and equality, even though you're pushed down over and over again, I think you believe and you ultimately do prevail. The song we sang in America in my community here in Montgomery, Alabama, throughout the 50s and 60s, was we shall overcome. And we didn't sing that song because we had some clear marker here or there. that victory was in front of us. We sang it because it's what we have to believe. And I think that's something I'm encouraging people to sing more and more these days because in the face of this kind of use of power to intimidate,

we're going to have to find our strength, not just our physical strength, but our moral strength, our spiritual strength, our cultural strength, to withstand these really unprecedented threats to American democracy. Brian Stevenson, thank you so much for this. My pleasure. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.