Slavery (Historical)

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    The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

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    I don’t know why I was surprised when President Trump went after the Smithsonian Institution, in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture — or as it’s more informally known, the Black Smithsonian. If anything, I should have been surprised he held off for two months. On March 27, he issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that accused the Smithsonian Institution of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” He called out the Black Smithsonian in particular for being subject “to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The federal government, he declared, will no longer support historical projects that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”I think Mr. Trump’s presidency is a national tragedy. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I have some sympathy for the concerns he raised about the agenda of much historical thinking these days. Too often it indulges in sloppy and even childish stereotypes, depicting America’s past as one extended hit job.The boldness of the American experiment, the emergence of the Constitution, the evolution of public schooling, the expansion of the right to vote, the rise of the conservationism and the flourishing of our diverse cultural life — reducing all of this to the machinations of a sinister white cabal is, like the 1980s power ballad, seductive but vapid. That white lady at the supermarket with her 6-year-old daughter has organized her life around defending her privilege? I’m not seeing it.President Trump visited the National Museum of African American History in 2017.Doug Mills/The New York TimesI shudder at suggestions that — as a graphic on the Black Smithsonian’s own website put it a few years ago — “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis” and “decision-making” are the purview of white culture. I despise equally the idea that Black people are communal, oral, “I’ll get to that tomorrow” sorts who like to circle around the answer rather than actually arrive at it.And I am especially dismayed at how this version of history implies that the most interesting thing about the experience of Black Americans has been their encounter with whiteness. I figured that the president was being typically hyperbolic when he said that institutions like the museum deepen “societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe” — I mean, even something as stupid as that guide to whiteness might just be an outlying mistake. But I was wary that a national museum might squander its chance to illuminate complex topics and expand people’s curiosity, instead trying to corral everyone into caricatures and oversimplifications. As I read the executive order, however, it occurred to me that after all these years, I had yet to actually visit the museum. So, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I decided to zip over to the National Mall to take a look. I will not soon forget what I saw.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Wishes Aside, Censoring Racial History May Prove Difficult

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      Late last month, when two federal grants to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana were rescinded, the Trump administration seemed to be following through on its promise to root out what President Trump called “improper ideology” in cultural institutions focused on Black history.After all, the plantation’s mission was to show visitors what life was truly like for the enslaved, contrary to the watered-down Black history that the president seemed to back.Then just as quickly, the grants were restored a few weeks later, the Whitney Plantation’s executive director said in an interview.Because the money had already been approved, “maybe it was an exposure for lawsuits,” the executive director, Ashley Rogers, said, “but who knows?”Ever since Mr. Trump issued an executive order in March decrying cultural institutions that were trying to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” sites like the Whitney Plantation have lived with such uncertainty. An order specifically targeting the Smithsonian Institution tasked Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials with “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”But reversals like the one in Louisiana and actions by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seem to indicate some misgivings about the president’s order. They also show that putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fort Liberty Set to Be Renamed Fort Bragg, Fulfilling a Trump Promise

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      In 2020, Congress pushed past the president’s veto of a military policy bill to rename the base, which was originally named for a Confederate general.The Trump administration will officially reinstate the name of an Army base in North Carolina on Friday to Fort Bragg, which was originally named for an incompetent Confederate general who owned enslaved people.The base’s name was changed to Fort Liberty in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military’s examination of its history with race. But President Trump campaigned on a promise to restore the old name.The official ceremony at the military base on Friday will cement a political victory for Mr. Trump, who suffered a legislative defeat in 2020 when Congress pushed past his veto of a bill with a provision to rename nine Army bases that had honored treasonous Confederate generals who fought against the United States to preserve slavery and white supremacy.The original naming of those bases was part of a movement to glorify the Confederacy and advance the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” and not slavery.The reversion of Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg is part of a larger effort by Mr. Trump to purge the military of top officers, diversity initiatives, transgender service members and other things that he said had made the armed forces “woke.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Crack, a Shift, Then Screams: Witnesses Describe Georgia Dock Collapse That Killed 7

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      Investigators have begun looking for reasons behind the failure at a ferry dock on Sapelo Island, the site of a festival celebrating the heritage of descendants of enslaved people. They had come to Sapelo Island, just off the curve of the Georgia coast, for a celebration of resilience, of a people, of a culture that for generations had been so fragile but could not be broken.The smell of smoked mullet drifted. Vendors sold red peas and rice. Performers onstage presented poetry and sang African spirituals.By midafternoon on Saturday, dozens readied for the trip back to the mainland, a route beginning with a ferry known as the Annemarie waiting at the end of the floating dock in the marsh. But then, a strange cracking noise. The walkway to the dock suddenly shifted. Then it collapsed.“Everyone’s falling into the water, and you’re hearing screams,” said Michael Wood, 43, who had been waiting in line to board.On Sunday, members of the tight-knit Gullah Geechee community, descendants of formerly enslaved people in the Southeast, who had gathered for a festival celebrating their heritage, mourned four women and three men, all of them older than 70, who were killed. And officials began investigating how a short journey to the only way off the Georgia island could have led to such tragedy.“The initial findings of our investigation at this point showed a catastrophic failure of the gangway, causing it to collapse,” said Walter Rabon, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, adding that investigators and engineers will be gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses. Three people were also injured and remain hospitalized in critical condition. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Has Right-Wing Friends in High Places

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      The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86

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      She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s, when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations, to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history when she discovered, in an old trunk, hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations.Alfred A. KnopfWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Estalló una guerra cultural por las casas señoriales del Reino Unido. ¿Quién ganó?

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      Una batalla en torno a la historia de las casas de campo más preciadas del país ofrecía un vistazo al estado de ánimo nacional antes de unas elecciones clave.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Un cuadro en Dyrham House, una gran mansión en el suroeste de Inglaterra, ofrece una vista panorámica del puerto de Bridgetown, Barbados, con plantaciones de azúcar salpicadas a lo largo de una ladera.En otra habitación hay dos figuras talladas que representan a hombres negros arrodillados, sosteniendo sobre sus cabezas conchas de vieira. Están encadenados por los tobillos y el cuello.Estas obras pertenecieron a William Blathwayt, quien fue propietario de Dyrham a finales del siglo XVII y principios del XVIII y, como auditor general británico de las rentas de las plantaciones, supervisaba las ganancias que llegaban de las colonias.Explicar la historia de un lugar como Dyrham puede resultar polémico, como ha descubierto el National Trust, la organización benéfica de casi 130 años de antigüedad que gestiona muchas de las casas históricas más preciadas del Reino Unido.Después de que la organización renovó sus exposiciones para poner de relieve los vínculos entre decenas de sus propiedades y la explotación y la esclavitud de la época colonial, provocó la ira de algunos columnistas y académicos de derecha, que acusaron al fondo de ser “progre”, insinuaron que estaba presentando una visión“antibritánica” de la historia e iniciaron una campaña para revertir algunos de los cambios.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.A portrait of Mary Ann Schuyler, who was one of Toussaint’s hairdressing clients. She wrote that she enjoyed their conversations as a “daily recreation.”Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint did not resist his enslavement either in Haiti or New York and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yale Apologizes for Its Connections to Slavery

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      The university also issued a historical study and announced steps to address this legacy, including new support for public education in New Haven, Conn.Yale University on Friday issued a formal apology for its early leaders’ involvement with slavery, accompanied by the release of a detailed history of the university’s connections to slavery and a list of what it said were initial steps to make some amends.The announcement came more than three years after Yale announced a major investigation into the university’s connections to slavery, the slave trade and abolition, amid intense national conversations about racial justice set off by the murder of George Floyd. And it frames what the school’s leaders say will be a continuing commitment to repair.“We recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” the university’s president, Peter Salovey, and the senior board trustee, Josh Bekenstein, said in a message to the university community.“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward,” they continued. The university is also creating new programs to fund the training of public schoolteachers for its home city, New Haven, Conn., whose population is predominantly Black. And Yale will expand previously announced research partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities across the country, with a “significant new investment” to be announced in coming weeks.Unlike Harvard, which in 2022 committed $100 million to a “Legacy of Slavery Fund,” Yale did not announce an amount for all its initiatives.David W. Blight, the Yale historian who led the historical research, said in an interview that the purpose of the effort was not “to cast ugly stones at anybody,” but to present the university’s history honestly and unflinchingly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More