BLACK HISTORY IS EVIDENCE

Erasure Is the Point: What America Loses When It Removes Black History from the National Story

IN RESPONSE

This commentary is written in response to The Guardian’s September 12 interview with Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and outgoing Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Smithsonian Secretary and founding Director of NMAAH, Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III

In the interview, Bunch discusses the extraordinary political pressure placed upon the Smithsonian as the Trump administration has sought to reshape how the nation’s museums present American history. The administration has accused the Smithsonian of advancing a divisive, race-centered interpretation of the country. It has demanded changes intended to emphasize American achievement and a more celebratory national narrative. Bunch rejects that characterization, arguing that confronting the country’s conflicts and contradictions is essential to understanding how America became what it is.

Most important for what follows, Bunch identifies the boundary he would not cross. The Guardian reports that he had one “fundamental red line”: erasing no one’s history, because he comes from a community whose histories have themselves been erased.

That is the point.

This is not simply about revising Black history. It is about erasing it. And we need to understand exactly what is being erased.

When the history of American chattel slavery is removed, softened, or pushed out of public view, that does not erase only Black history. It erases white American history as well. The transatlantic slave trade, the buying and selling of human beings, the plantations, the banks and businesses that profited from slavery, the laws that protected it, the governments that enforced it, and the political compromises that sustained it are part of white America’s history.

And the survival of that system is Black history. The resistance to it is Black history. The families created and sustained in spite of it are Black history. Emancipation, Reconstruction, the building of Black institutions, the fight against Jim Crow and the continuing struggle to force America to honor the citizenship it promised are Black history.

But together, all of it is American history.

That is why removing this history from museums, national parks and other public spaces is so consequential. A museum does more than preserve objects. It establishes public memory. It tells the generations walking through its doors: This happened. These people were here. These people did this. These people endured this. These people resisted. And these events helped create the country we now live in.

Erase the evidence, and eventually you can erase the accountability.

There was an extraordinary irony on the National Mall this Fourth of July. When severe thunderstorms struck during the Freedom 250 celebration, the National Mall was evacuated, and attendees were directed to emergency shelters. Among those shelters was the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Thousands of people attending the celebration, including Trump supporters, sought refuge there from the storm.

Think about that.

People gathered for a celebration of America took physical refuge inside a building dedicated to preserving a history that some in power are trying to recast, diminish or remove from the national story.

They took shelter beneath the roof of Black memory.

That museum exists because Black history could not safely be left to the benevolence of national memory. Too much had already been omitted, distorted, romanticized, or simply forgotten. And now the battle is not merely over what interpretation will appear beside an artifact. The larger battle is over what America will be permitted to remember about itself. Just yesterday, inside the very museum he fought to create, Bunch returned to precisely this question.

Secretary Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III, who shepherded the creation of the National Museum for African American History and Culture.

Speaking at the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s 10th anniversary celebration on Friday, September 25, he rejected the notion that confronting the darkest portions of American history is somehow an act against the country. He called slavery “foundational” to understanding the United States and argued that the responsibility of museums is to illuminate the whole history, not simply those portions that make the nation comfortable.

“You cannot understand the greatness of a country without understanding the totality of a country,” Bunch said. “You cannot understand all without illuminating the dark corners. Curating means let’s shine the light. Let’s tell the truth.”

And therein lies the problem with erasure.

You cannot erase the enslaved without also erasing the enslaver. You cannot erase the slave auction without erasing the buyer. You cannot erase the plantation without erasing the people who owned it and the economic system that profited from it. You cannot erase Jim Crow without erasing the legislatures that enacted it, the courts that upheld it, and the institutions that administered it. And you cannot erase Black resistance without erasing the forces against which Black people were required to resist.

So this is not simply an assault on “Black history.” It is an assault on the historical record itself.

Black history does not sit alongside American history as an elective chapter that can be removed when it makes somebody uncomfortable.

Black history is evidence. And perhaps that is precisely why its erasure matters so much.

SOURCES

The Guardian, September 12, 2026: “Don’t I deserve a little grace?” Lonnie Bunch on pressure from Trump and leaving the Smithsonian on his own terms.

The Guardian, September 26, 2026: “Let’s tell the truth”: Smithsonian head given standing ovation as he hits back at Trump attacks.

CBS News, July 4, 2026: Coverage of the National Mall evacuation and emergency shelter locations during the Freedom 250 celebration.

TheGrio, July 5, 2026: Coverage of Freedom 250 attendees taking shelter inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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