This article is republished from Verite News, one of Mississippi Today’s partner publications in Deep South Today.

Sally was 14 years old when she was put on a ship leaving Port Pontchartrain in Milneburg, now part of New Orleans, presumably to continue a life of forced labor and other untold horror in Alabama. She stood 4 feet 8 inches tall. 

That’s all I know about her, a single line from a January 1844 slave manifest for the ship Fashion, written for its trip to Mobile. 

I found out about Sally earlier this month as I stood on the lowest level of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. There, the tattered manifest, containing everything I’m ever likely to know about the girl,  was displayed behind glass, inspiring a flood of questions.

Who was Sally ripped away from? What was her life like before she was shipped away to Mobile?

Where did she end up — was Mobile the last place she would see, or was that just a transfer point?

How did she cope with the uncertainty of the devil she didn’t know?

A few paces away from the ship manifest, there was a poster advertising the sale of Isam, George, Betsy and Mary Jane, among others, at a slave auction at City Hotel on Common Street, in what’s now the New Orleans Central Business District. Isam had done enough in his roughly 40 years on Earth to warrant being described as “superior engineer and blacksmith … well known for character and qualification throughout the Parish of St. James.”

But the rest of them had much shorter CVs. There was a “house and confidential servant,” a “house girl,” a “field hand.” I wondered about them — these people whose entire lives were reduced to the roles that had been imposed on them — just as I had wondered about Sally. 

That ship manifest and slave auction poster are just two of the more than 150 artifacts of the centuries of dehumanization African-descended people endured at the hands of European settlers that are on view at the museum. These artifacts are proof of the immense suffering caused by the people who colonized the Americas, evidence of the exploitation used to birth the United States, watermarks that show exactly how much oppression a people can overcome.

And if it were up to President Donald Trump and his administration, I wouldn’t be able to see this history on display here. 

Since the early months of his second term, Trump has repeatedly criticized some of the ways that American history has been portrayed in the Smithsonian’s museums, demanding changes that reflect what he says is a more positive vision of this country’s story. Or, as critics see it, a whitewashing of that story. 

In Trump’s March executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” he wrote that the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” Then, in August, his administration sent a letter to Lonnie Bunch, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of NMAAHC, stating that he was going to start an internal review of select Smithsonian museums ahead of July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” Trump wrote that month on his social media platform, Truth Social. 

In the letter to Bunch, Trump’s aides outlined a timeline that the administration wants the Smithsonian to follow to ready its museums, including NMAAHC, the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History, to be seen by tourists visiting Washington, D.C. for the 250th anniversary celebration.

By Dec. 10, the museums were supposed to “begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions.”

It’s not yet clear what will become of the exhibits now on display in the museum. The Smithsonian Institution did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did White House officials.

All of this was alarming to me, a descendant of slaves whose roots in the Washington, D.C., region run deeper than the founding of the U.S., for a number of reasons. First, the Smithsonian museums — like the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian — are some of my favorite places to visit. To see their collections come under threat was worrying. Second, as a journalist, I value truth and accuracy not only in the first draft of history, but in all of its subsequent versions.

The third reason was the hardest to admit: I had never been to NMAAHC, and these threats to force revisions of museum materials meant that I may never be able to see the space as intended by the people who created it.

‘I took it for granted’

Black America was abuzz over the opening of the NMAAHC, or the “Blacksonian” as it came to be affectionately known, in 2016.  The museum was established in 2003 by an act introduced by Civil Rights icon John Lewis and signed into law by President George W. Bush. I learned more about all of the effort and energy that went into making the physical space a reality, including Bunch’s fight to have the museum located on prime real estate on the National Mall.

People I knew were excited that there was going to be a physical site that would contain a history long ignored by the mainstream in the U.S., one that was only fully taught in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Black studies departments, and in Black families. 

I was excited that it would be there, too, for others but I was less enthusiastic about going there myself. I was raised in a Black family that taught us about our community’s history (more on that later) and I went to an HBCU, so I knew a lot more about the history that would likely be contained in the museum than the average person.

And by the time the museum was going to open, I had grown tired of the focus on the symbolic advancement of Black people that became the norm during the Obama years. 

Right or wrong, I felt like there was more of an emphasis on the importance of representation  than on improving the material conditions of Black people in this country. The hype surrounding the opening of the museum — at first, tickets were so hard to come by they were treated almost as status symbols  — felt like more of the same.

Because of all of that, I ended up doing something that many people who grew up in the D.C. area do with the many attractions, historical sites and halls of powers that line the National Mall: I took the museum for granted.

It has the same sense of permanence that I think of when I think of the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument (which I also hadn’t been inside of). The museum was something that I would visit eventually, but there was no rush.

All of that changed when I first read about the Trump administration’s demands of the Smithsonian Institution. I felt a mix of shame, guilt, stupidity and frustration. I felt like I had betrayed some duty to bear witness to the museum and the history it contained. I felt dumb for assuming that anything in this universe is permanent, let alone a monument to the history of a country that is itself only a few hundred years old. 

And I was annoyed that Trump and his operatives had even jeopardized my ability to act like a punky brat about visiting the museum.

I could no longer take it for granted.  So Dec. 10, I caught a plane from New Orleans to Washington, where I grew up, to get my first, and possibly last, look at what the Smithsonian describes as an attempt to present the “unvarnished truth of African American history and culture.”

‘It’s really heart-wrenching’

It was easy enough to find fans of the museum who had opinions about the Trump administration’s threats.

It was much more challenging, though, to find people who work or worked there who were willing to talk about how the museum is responding. For months, I sought out current or former employees of NMAAHC, and received minimal responses. The museum’s media team also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. I also contacted people in leadership at organizations that helped get the Blacksonian off the ground as founding donors, but they didn’t want to talk either.

Finally, I was connected with Jordan Blanchard, who was an intern at the museum from 2017 to 2018, during the early years after the opening of the brick-and-mortar building. (The Smithsonian first launched a website for the museum in 2007, nine years before the grand opening of the physical space.)

Jordan’s internship at the NMAAHC was one of her first jobs. She grew up in New Orleans like her father, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. But she spent breaks from school in Washington, D.C. — where her mother, Robin Burgess, is from — and visited Smithsonian museums while staying in town. (Terence Blanchard serves on Verite News’ board of advisers.)

“It was really always my comfort space to be in a building surrounded by old stuff,” she told me. So, when she took a gap year before college, she applied to the Smithsonian’s internship program, and her top choice was to work at the African-American museum.

The day of her job interview marked the first time she set foot in the building. As she walked in, she was distracted by a disagreement she’d had with her mother over what she should wear, she told me. But her focus quickly shifted once she began to explore the building.

Even though she was well-educated in Black history and the African diaspora, she was still blown away by the care put into telling the stories that made up the exhibits and designing the spaces where they were kept. She began at the lowest level of the building, where museum volunteers and regulars tell first-time visitors they should start. That floor contains artifacts and information about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery in America.

“It just gets so devastating from there, and then there’s a whole emotional roller coaster that you go on to sort of mimic the highs and lows of our broader journey as a population,” she said. “It’s really, honestly wild for anyone who’s never been there before.”

Blanchard’s year at the museum was formative. She was a public relations and marketing intern, so she had to study the museum’s exhibits to be able to communicate about them with visitors and the press. When family and friends came into town, she gave them tours and directed them to specific exhibits connected to their family and community histories. Working around so many Black women with advanced degrees gave her confidence, she said, that she carried with her as she earned master’s and doctoral degrees.

So it’s been frustrating for her to see the Trump administration raise issues with how the museum portrays Black history.

“I don’t think that there is much positivity at all in asking us to hide the injustices that our community has faced, specifically at the hands of white America,” she said. “And I’m very firm in not censoring that part of our history whatsoever, especially coming from the South, especially coming from a place like New Orleans.”

Everyone else I spoke with about the administration’s moves in relation to the Smithsonian shared Blanchard’s frustration. A scholar who has conducted research at the museum spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out against the Trump administration. She said that working at the Blacksonian was “an experience of a lifetime” and that the pressure placed on the museum by the administration is “horrific.”

“It’s really heart-wrenching because … it took so much energy and effort to finally get off the ground, and it is not even a decade old and it’s already being undone in some ways or sidetracked from its vision,” she said.

Divisive and dangerous

Avatara Smith-Carrington, associate counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that the letter to Bunch is part of an “ongoing attack” on teaching Black history and culture by not just the Trump administration, but conservative legislators across the U.S., including in K-12 and post-secondary institutions. In 2020, during his first term, Trump signed an executive order meant to discourage the teaching of what his administration called “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism in federal agencies, civil service, and the military.

Between then and late last year, state legislatures passed 51 laws restricting race education, according to reporting from The Washington Post. Some of these, like Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act and similar laws passed in Texas, Tennessee and Oklahoma, effectively prohibit public K-12 schools from teaching about the role of race in shaping America. The Smithsonian, Smith-Carrington said, is just a new theater in the war over public education.

“It is an escalation,” they said, “We’re talking about historical sites across the country that are being impacted by the administration’s efforts to essentially write their own version of what is American history that not only excludes Black people, Black culture and Black history, but also minimizes the ways in which Black people have persevered.”

Recent efforts to censor Black history are “just plain dangerous,” Chandra Manning, a historian who teaches about slavery, the Civil War and emancipation at Georgetown University, told me. We spoke at the onset of the 43-day shutdown of the federal government this fall, which came just after I initially booked my trip to go see the Blacksonian for the first time.

At the time, given the shutdown, which temporarily closed the museum, I told her I was worried I might not see it before alterations were made to exhibits.

She couldn’t offer any reassurances.

Instead, she shared her worries with me about the push to revise American history to exclude the struggles historically marginalized groups have had to overcome in order to survive.

“This looks like a concerted effort to edit out periods of conflict, and in particular, to edit out anything to do with anybody who’s not white,” she said. “And that is dangerous.”

That’s because, she said, that the erasure of a group or groups from the past can serve to make erasing them now and in the future seem more legit.

I reached out to Smith-Carrington and Manning both because they work with groups who, in one form or another, are doing something to preserve Black history.

About a month after Trump name-checked the Smithsonian leadership in his “Restoring Sanity” executive order, a coalition of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Urban League and African American Policy Forum, vowed to defend Black history from censorship A few days later, leaders of some of those organizations, including former New Orleans mayor and Urban League President Marc Morial, led a march of hundreds of people on the National Mall to the NMAAHC (Morial serves on Verite News’ board of advisers).

The Legal Defense Fund has litigated on behalf of the NAACP to challenge legislation meant to curb the teaching of Black history in public K-12 schools, most recently in a lawsuit against the state of South Carolina over a new law restricting how public schools can teach about the history of racial inequality.  

When I asked Smith-Carrington if the LDF would sue to stop the push to review and potentially alter material in the Smithsonian museums, they said the LDF is “committed to exploring all avenues in terms of supporting efforts that will allow for Black history and culture to continue to be shown,” but said that support could take the form of policy development, organizing or communications, not just litigation.

And just days after the Trump administration published its August letter to Bunch, Manning co-founded Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian with fellow historian James Millward and technologist Jessica Dickinson Goodman. The project is an effort to digitally preserve the exhibits of the Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Over the course of seven weeks beginning in August, more than 1,500 volunteers took nearly 50,000 photos and videos of exhibits at these institutions and documented 100 percent of Smithsonian exhibits, according to the group’s website.

“We certainly aren’t capturing the full story of the Smithsonian by a long shot, but we are capturing one little thing, and that is a snapshot of” what the exhibits looked like in 2025, before any changes were made, Manning told me.

That was reassuring, actually. Still, I needed to see the Blacksonian for myself.

‘What we create’

I was on the second floor from the bottom at the museum when an eerie familiarity set in — the warble of an organ playing gospel music: I realized I was walking into a recreation of a funeral. I walked down a narrow hallway that opened up into a small room with pictures and information on some of the walls and a couple rows of pews. Most of the room was dimly-lit, except for a bright set of lights shining on the casket of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of whistling at and grabbing a white woman (the woman in question later said her testimony as to what happened was a fabrication).

A deluge of sadness, anger and desperation — the kind of desperation to reverse a tragedy that can’t be undone — engulfed me as I walked up to his casket. It was the boy’s real casket, which was donated to the museum in 2009. After a few moments standing in front of the casket, I became overwhelmed and had to sit down in a pew. 

A burgeoning of tears that accumulated during my tour through dozens of exhibits about slavery and Jim Crow crested and crashed, and I began crying.

There was a placard in front of the stage where his casket lay that reminded me that we share the same birthday. He was born two years before my dad, and his middle name, Louis, was my dad’s first. My first name is the same as the city where he was lynched: Drew, Mississippi. I remembered the three Black men — my father, my brother, Damon, and my childhood friend, Alex — whose funerals and memorials I attended over the last six years.

Immersive experiences like the one I had at the Emmett Till memorial are important to conveying the suffering that Black people experienced throughout American history, and one of the specialties of the Blacksonian. 

It was clear to me that there was a lot of attention paid to dimension and atmosphere, especially in the museum’s lower levels. A dark, cramped room toward the beginning of the “Slavery and Freedom” section of the museum gives a sense of the space Africans were forced into on slave ships on the Middle Passage.

At one point, as I walked through that section, I heard a young man declare, “This is crazy,” as he got the attention of his family and ushered them over to what he was looking at. He showed them a paragraph describing how slaves were stripped of their religion. The rest of his family were just as surprised as he was.

And, I think, this is at least one reason why all of the people who spoke with me about the threats to teaching about the horrors of America’s past at the Smithsonian — and public education in general — are worried. People aren’t even fully aware of all of the suffering and struggle that so many endured in order to create this country. So the push to censor public education, whether it be in schools or museums, is part of an attempt to halt and reverse the material gains made by historically marginalized groups.

To try to water down the parts of the museum that the Trump administration might consider “divisive,” as it described in its letter, would also lessen the effectiveness of the design of the museum. As someone who loves museums in general and appreciates the art of educational design in particular, the Blacksonian was far and above other museums in terms of its thoughtfulness about how to present concepts and immerse visitors in their learning.

The Interactive Lunch Counter exhibit on the same level of the museum as the Emmett Till Memorial places visitors in the shoes of those who participated in the sit-in movement through a choose-your-own-adventure game. A few floors up from that, there’s an area where people can start to research their family histories. A genealogist is there on Tuesdays and Thursdays to guide people through that process. Bars, bunks and a toilet, all made of metal, that used to furnish a cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola are on display.

And in the museum’s Musical Crossroads section, the Mothership from Parliament-Funkadelic’s stage show is hanging from the ceiling, there is a pretend record shop where people can learn about music from across the African diaspora, and there is an interactive exhibit where visitors can create compositions using samples of music from a variety of Black music genres. I can’t believe I slept on this museum for so long.

One of the things that I noticed about the museum’s lower levels — where slavery, segregation and white supremacy are heavily discussed — is that many of the displays and exhibits can’t easily be scrubbed away. Quotes about the horrors of anti-Black racism are painted onto the walls. The names of Black people who were lynched during the Jim Crow era are etched into glass. The truth about the centuries of slavery and segregation Black people experienced in the U.S. is inextricably linked to the building, as it is with the history of the country. 

When I went home to visit the museum, I spoke with one of my older cousins, Nadia Conyers. She was an NMAAHC Ambassador in its early years, meaning she donated to the museum and promoted it in the community. In return, she was able to do cool stuff like attend the museum’s opening night in 2016, bringing my little cousin DJ, when he was still in elementary school.

We talked in the living room of the home that she and her husband bought from my godmother, on either side of a coffee table with a glass top that had pictures of multiple generations of our family underneath. She said that the Blacksonian tells a more complete history not just of Black Americans, but also of white Americans. And it tells the story of all of the ways a people can overcome such ubiquitous oppression over the course of time.

“I think that the museum speaks directly to when we’re put in those situations, what we create and what happens as a result,” she said. “And that is terrifying to people in an administration like that, and to have that symbol in your backyard, of, even if you do this to us, this is what we can do. He doesn’t want that. That’s too much.”

Nadia and I are both the grandchildren of Phyllis Costley, a woman who, along with other parents in Arlington, Virginia, successfully fought to desegregate schools in the state in the face of massive resistance. We’re both descended from a family of educators. So we both know the importance of knowing Black history and passing the word down.

And, well, she’s my big cousin.

So I wasn’t surprised at her reaction when I told her that I hadn’t gone to the museum until a couple of days before we spoke. But the reason for her response surprised me.

“I’m astonished, because coming from where we come from, we take the Smithsonian for granted, because we live here, right?” she said. “But to hear that you didn’t go to the African American museum is wild to me because as the grandchild who is the storyteller of all of us, I’m like, how is it that you didn’t go to the museum? You being the child of your father, who was someone who was a history buff. It’s like one plus one equals two.”

I assumed that there would be some relatively broad reasoning for her astonishment that I hadn’t visited before, like “all Black people have a duty to go,” or something like that. But when she said that I have a role within our family as a storyteller and a love for history that I got from my father, my prior negligence carried new depth and weight. It reminded me of a concept that I learned in my young adulthood that has stuck with me over the years: sankofa.

Sankofa, a word that comes from the Akan language of Ghana, has evolved in the Black community over time to mean that we can learn from the past to build the future. The two literal translations I found online are “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot” and “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” I was taught that it’s imperative to learn from the past in order to inform the future and that you are sent off into the world to acquire skills and knowledge that you then use to help your village. This isn’t only a quaint piece of wisdom passed down through generations — it is a matter of survival.

I’m grateful that I finally made my pilgrimage to the NMAAHC and got to it before the Trump administration could. When I first walked in, I felt a settling in my shoulders and chest, a release of tension, like sitting on the couch at home after a long journey. Walking through the museum for the first time was like engaging with a work of art that is exhilarating as a complete piece but promises individual delightful layers.

I hope that the haven that I found remains in the hands of those who so carefully crafted it. And I hope that we can all learn from the story they are telling.