Museums must do more than display Black History—They must defend it

Growing up in Washington, D.C., I wandered the museums of the National Mall searching for something familiar, somewhere in the glass cases and solemn wall texts where my history might be acknowledged. Instead, I often found my heritage simplified, misrepresented, or entirely absent. It wasn’t until the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture that I encountered a museum that felt like it was built for someone like me. That museum didn’t just offer representation—it offered truth, memory, and pride. 

Today, that truth is under threat. 

In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. It demands that federal museums—including the Smithsonian Institution—purge “divisive narratives” and “race-centered ideologies” from their exhibits and educational programming. While vague in language, the order specifically targets the NMAAHC and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, signaling an ideological agenda aimed at erasing the hard-won gains in representation and inclusion that have only recently taken root. 

The order is more than symbolic. It weaponizes nostalgia and nationalism against institutions that have only begun to tell America’s full story. It threatens to undo decades of work by curators, educators, scholars, and community members who have fought to reclaim space in institutions that once excluded them entirely. And it ignores the essential role museums play in shaping national memory and cultural consciousness. 

For centuries, they served the interests of empire, nationalism, and whiteness. They legitimized looting under the guise of scholarship and education. They curated human hierarchies into their displays, reinforcing racist ideologies and exclusionary practices. In the United States, early museums excluded African Americans as visitors, subjects, and curators. In the most egregious cases, they participated directly in dehumanization—exhibiting African individuals as curiosities in “ethnological displays,” legitimizing white supremacy through spectacle. 

It is only in the last few decades that museums have begun to reckon with these legacies. The shift has been slow and uneven, but deeply significant. In New York City alone, institutions are beginning to engage African American history with creativity, depth, and care. 

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, the recent Edges of Ailey exhibition presents the life and legacy of choreographer Alvin Ailey through an immersive and interdisciplinary lens. The show abandons the traditional chronology of biography, choosing instead to center embodied memory, performance, and community. It offers a living archive of Black movement, anchored not by artifacts alone but by rhythm, resilience, and resistance. 

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room radically reimagines what a period room can be. Instead of replicating the aesthetics of white aristocracy, it constructs a speculative Black interior rooted in the erased history of Seneca Village. The exhibition collapses time—honoring ancestral pasts, acknowledging cultural loss, and imagining liberated futures. 

And at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, youth from the Junior Scholars Program reimagined the Black ABCs—an iconic educational tool from the 1970s—into contemporary works of art. Their exhibition, Letters from Home, blends AI, painting, and photography into a vibrant alphabet of Black expression. Words like “Mourn,” “Yurrrr,” and “Fresh” carry stories of grief, joy, creativity, and resistance—reclaiming childhood education as a space of empowerment. 

These exhibitions are not just innovative—they are necessary. 

They correct, expand, and deepen our understanding of American history. They bring nuance and emotional depth to narratives that have too often been flattened or ignored. And they affirm that African American history is not a sidebar to the American story—it is central to it. 

As a museum studies researcher and a young Black woman, I believe museums have a responsibility to educate, challenge, and uplift. I wrote my thesis—From Harlem to Wall Street: The Representation of African American History and Culture in New York City Museums—to examine precisely how institutions are evolving in their treatment of Black narratives. What I found was both hopeful and sobering. Progress is being made, but it remains fragile, precarious, and easily undone by political intervention. 

The Trump administration’s executive order is a chilling reminder of that fragility. 

By attempting to control museum content from the top down, the federal government is violating the intellectual integrity of cultural institutions and placing ideology over scholarship. The consequences of such actions ripple far beyond museum walls. They distort education, limit public discourse, and endanger the ability of future generations to understand the complexities of this country’s history. 

What is “divisive” about telling the truth? 

What is “improper” about acknowledging the full humanity of enslaved people, freedom fighters, artists, mothers, workers, and children who helped build this nation?

Museums must not surrender to pressure that demands simplicity in place of complexity, myth in place of memory. They must resist the sanitization of history and reaffirm their role as protectors of collective truth. This means curators must be bold. Institutions must be transparent. And communities must remain vigilant. 

The stakes are personal. 

I remember what it felt like to walk into museums and not see myself. I remember the quiet pain of absence—of having to imagine myself into the past. And I remember what it felt like, finally, to see a museum built not just with me in mind, but for me. 

We cannot afford to move backward. 

This moment demands courage—not just from scholars and curators, but from all of us who believe in truth, justice, and the power of history to transform the future. Museums must do more than display Black history—they must defend it.

Heaven Holford (she/her) is a recent graduate of Fordham University, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and African and African American Studies. This fall, she will begin a Master’s program in Museum Studies at George Washington University. Growing up visiting museums in Washington, D.C. with her father, Heaven developed a deep connection to the ways Black culture and history are presented in public spaces. Her academic interests focus on the presentation and delivery of Black history, the preservation of Black cultural heritage, and the ethical responsibilities of museums in shaping public understanding. She is passionate about building inclusive and accountable cultural institutions and hopes to one day work in community-centered museums that amplify underrepresented narratives and center community voices.