Donald Trump wants slavery buried — without even a headstone to mark that it existed.
In August, he fumed that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” for showing “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”
He has always trafficked in historical distortion. But his latest denial of slavery’s horrors is an escalation: It seeks to put the truth in chains, shackling history in service of his brand of MAGA fascism. Authoritarianism depends on erasing, distorting, and rewriting history so that violence and repression appear justified and inevitable. That’s why Trump has declared war on museums, schools, and curricula: If he can control the story of slavery, he can control the meaning of freedom.
In a recent social media post, Trump lashed out at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, accusing it of focusing too much on slavery and not enough on the “Success” and “Brightness,” of the United States. His words came as his administration launched a 120-day review of museum exhibits, demanding curators “adjust any content” that does not sufficiently align with “American ideals.” He further boasted that he had instructed his attorneys to “go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.” In other words, this was no stray rant — it was a declaration of intent to make museums the next battlefield in his war on truth.
To be clear, this isn’t the first time Trump has lied about slavery. In a June 2024 speech to the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, he falsely claimed that George Washington “probably didn’t” own enslaved people. In reality, Washington “owned” 123 enslaved Black people, and the total number of enslaved people on his Mount Vernon chattel labor complex (politely referred to as his plantation) swelled to 317 when he married his wife, Martha. That’s because she brought with her another 153 enslaved human beings inherited from her first husband. Washington owned Black people until his last breath, and upon his death, he bequeathed his human property to his wife.
Washington was no “benevolent master.” He aggressively pursued runaway slaves — including Ona Judge, who escaped from his plantation and was never caught. He condoned the brutal violence that kept slavery in place. There is record of Washington ordering an enslaved man to be whipped for walking on the lawn. His secretary once recorded that “no whipping is allowed without a regular complaint & the defendant found guilty of some bad deed” — with “guilt” determined entirely by Washington or his overseers. Overseer Humphrey Knight reported to Washington in 1758: “As to the Carpenters, I have minded em all I possibly could, and has whipt em when I could see a fault.”
This was the daily terror George Washington used that kept human beings in chains.
Trump’s recent comments attempting to whitewash slavery are part of a broader movement to replace critical thinking with what I call “Uncritical Race Theory” — an ideology that denies the brutality of slavery and the centrality of it to the U.S. economy, while promoting the idea that racism either doesn’t exist; or if it does exist, primarily harms white people; or is only the product of individual prejudice, never systemic or institutional.
Uncritical Race Theory is quickly becoming official state doctrine — even if its architects are too dishonest to call it that — and it’s spreading across the country.
Florida’s official curriculum — not the Klan’s youth handbook, but the state’s actual standard — now claims slavery was of “personal benefit” to Black peoples. Under Trump, the National Park Service even scrubbed Harriet Tubman from its Underground Railroad webpage, replacing her story of defiance with a sanitized theme of “Black/White cooperation.”
In Oklahoma, the assault on truth has reached a new low. Superintendent Ryan Walters decreed that teachers moving from California or New York must pass a certification exam before entering a classroom — a modern-day loyalty oath straight out of the McCarthy era. The kicker? It’s not overseen by educators or universities but by PragerU. Despite its name, PragerU isn’t a university; it’s a $60 million right-wing media company producing slick propaganda targeting kids that is designed to normalize whitewashed myths. Already, PragerU curriculum is approved for use in classrooms in public schools in at least eight states, including Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Louisiana, South Carolina, Idaho, and Arizona.
And at the federal level, Trump is cutting PBS funding while embracing PragerU as the White House’s preferred alternative. PragerU explicitly notes it aims to capitalize on the defunding of PBS to go “toe-to-toe with PBS Kids.”
Consider one PragerU’s cartoons: Two kids travel back to meet Christopher Columbus and ask about his enslavement of Indigenous people. Columbus shrugs: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” The children assure him slavery isn’t allowed in the 21st century, and Columbus convinces them it isn’t fair to judge him by the standards of the future. In short, the video teaches children not to “see the problem” with slavery, that criticism of enslavement is unfair, and that the real danger lies not in mass human bondage but in judging history too harshly.
Yet, even in his own time, Columbus faced condemnation. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish colonist turned Dominican friar, publicly denounced the violence against the Indigenous Taíno people. In his History of the Indies, de las Casas wrote that the Spanish “took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags … roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, ‘Boil there, you offspring of the devil!’… They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground … then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive.”
His opposition proves that Columbus’s actions were not judged harshly only by later generations — they were decried by people who witnessed them firsthand.
In another video, PragerU commits a full-on memory hole rewrite by putting deceitful words into the mouth of Frederick Douglass. The cartoon depicts kids traveling back to 1852 to meet Douglass, who tells them, “Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong … they wanted it to end … there was no real movement anywhere in the world to abolish slavery before the American founding … our system is wonderful.”
Pause for a moment to let this flagrant insult to truth and this obscene perversion of history sink in. PragerU actually portrays Frederick Douglass — a man who dedicated his life to destroying slavery — as declaring “our system is wonderful.” And not in some vague, ahistorical sense, but in 1852, the very year Douglass delivered his most blistering indictment of the United States in his famous oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
In that speech, Douglass declared, “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour … for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Where Douglass eviscerated the United States for its barbarity and hypocrisy, PragerU recasts him as a cheerleader for American exceptionalism. This is not history — it is indoctrination. It erases the radical truth-telling of one of the greatest abolitionists in history and replaces it with the very lies he spent his life fighting.
In his book How the Word Is Passed, poet, historian, and best-selling author Clint Smith writes:
The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it…. We can learn this history by standing on the land where it happened. And we can learn this history from our own families, by sitting down and having conversations with our elders and getting insight into all that they’ve seen.
While Trump and his coterie of uncritical race theorists work to bury history, I went South this summer to unearth mine.
Several years ago, my father discovered the locations of the plantations where our family had been enslaved. Since then, my father, brother, son, and I have been traveling to Lawrence County and Morgantown, Mississippi, to stand on that land and to continue work on a documentary about our family’s history of enslavement and resistance. Being there with three generations of our family was no abstract history lesson — it was an act of radical remembering.
There are still people alive today who knew those who had been enslaved. That history isn’t distant — it’s still breathing beside us.
We went to honor Thomas and Laura Lenoir, my great-great-grandparents. Laura was born in 1852, the same year Frederick Douglass delivered his scorching speech condemning slavery. That connection brought history into sharper focus. I found myself wondering: What would Laura say today about PragerU’s grotesque distortions — about the attempt to twist the year of her birth into a fable that recasts Douglass’s searing denunciation as praise for the very system that enslaved her?
Last summer, we installed a headstone to mark Thomas and Laura’s resting place and legacy. As we gathered with community members, a woman in her 90s approached me with something that stopped me cold: she had once been friends with my great-great-grandmother Laura. That revelation hit me like a thunderclap. There are still people alive today who knew those who had been enslaved. That history isn’t distant — it’s still breathing beside us.
Then she told another story I’ll never forget. During Jim Crow, Black families in her town built a preschool for their children. The Ku Klux Klan burned it down, hoping to drive them away. But the community members didn’t run. They armed themselves, rebuilt the school in a tent, and stayed. They fought back. They held on.
Later in our trip, we had the opportunity to meet with descendants of those who had enslaved our family. They gave us a rare and chilling gift that had been passed down through their family: an original copy of The Laws of Mississippi, 1823. Inside was a statute criminalizing Black education and gathering, which states: “All meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes, or mulattoes, mixing and associating with such slaves, at any school or schools for teaching them reading or writing … shall be deemed and considered an unlawful assembly … The officer … shall have power to inflict … twenty lashes on his or their bare back … and shall be entitled to receive … twenty-five cents for each slave so punished.”
This was their blueprint for white supremacist control designed to choke out Black literacy before it could ever become resistance. And yet, in the face of these laws, our ancestors gathered anyway. Learned anyway. Taught anyway.
In fact, while searching courthouse records, we made a stunning discovery: the signature of my great-great-grandmother Laura Lenoir. Whereas many documents signed by formerly enslaved people had an X, Laura hand signed her name!
So we know she could write. Did she secretly learn during slavery, risking everything? Was she part of the extraordinary wave of learning during Reconstruction, when Black communities built the public schools and a movement for mass education? Did she ever feel the sting of the lash for daring to write, as that law demanded?
We may never know the details. But we know this: she learned. She wrote. And she passed the value of education for liberation on to her posterity; Laura had 15 children, with one dying as a child, and she put all 14 of her surviving children through college. Her son York Alanozo Lenoir — my great-grandfather — even became a teacher and principal and started Black schools around the South. Despite the government sanctioning beatings for literacy and the KKK burning down schools, my family and their communities refused to submit to white supremacist terror.
This is the history Trump and his allies want erased — not because it’s divisive, but because it’s powerful. Because it tells the truth about Black resistance, Black dignity, and the long shadow of slavery. The lies of today’s politicians and groups like PragerU are so dangerous because they revive the logic of those 1823 laws: controlling knowledge to control freedom.
And let’s be clear: Trump’s lies, and the policies that follow them, aren’t only about disgracing Laura and Thomas or making history palatable for those who want a fantasy version of the U.S. Trump wants a populace unaware of the Black freedom struggle — because it is a guide for defeating his fascist plans.
This isn’t the first time we’ve faced fascism in the U.S., and it isn’t the first time we’ve fought back.
“Authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening,” writes Jason Stanley, in his book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. “At every opportunity, these regimes find ways of erasing or concealing history in order to consolidate their power… All of this is true of authoritarianism in general, but it is especially true of one specific kind of authoritarian ideology: fascism.”
We are watching this fascist formula being rolled out around the country: deploying federal agents to occupy majority-Black cities under the banner of “law and order”; threatening to send the National Guard into urban areas with Black leadership; purging diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; demanding loyalty tests for teachers; and imposing Uncritical Race Theory as official curriculum.
Trump’s fascist project piles onto the U.S.’s ongoing systemic racism — the racial wealth gap, voter suppression, mass incarceration, and police terror — all legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.
When the woman in her 90s told me how her community armed itself and rebuilt their preschool in a tent after the KKK burned it down, I understood two things on a much deeper level: This isn’t the first time we’ve faced fascism in the U.S., and it isn’t the first time we’ve fought back — defending our communities and expanding our rights in the process.
Let her story summon in you the courage to join the struggles of today: to defend history in our schools and museums, to resist occupying armies in our cities, to stop immigration raids that are tearing families apart, and to reject every policy that seeks to bury truth and terrorize the vulnerable.
Truthout