Educators Fight Suppression to Teach America’s Real History

Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the nation’s past. He has cut funding and signed executive orders targeting historical programming at public institutions, including national parks, museums, and public schools, to silence or obscure the histories of communities of color and the systemic inequalities and racism those communities have endured since European settlers landed in what would later become the United States.

Now, some history advocacy organizations are leaning into community-based education programs to continue teaching a more diverse and comprehensive picture of the nation’s past. 

“Education doesn’t have to be within school buildings. We need to have outside activities that provide the teachings of Black history. I think that’s crucial,” says Kristi Williams, founder of Black History Saturdays, an organization offering free Black history classes to community members of all ages in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Whether they be in our churches, whether they be on the sidewalks, or in different spaces, we have to create those spaces.”

The need for community-led spaces has become increasingly apparent over the past few months as the Trump administration has sought to stifle cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the histories of communities of color while promoting its white supremacist political agenda. In March 2025, the White House issued an executive order to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American Education,” which targeted the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. While the museum’s mission is to capture and share “the unvarnished truth of African American history and culture,” Trump’s executive order labeled its work “divisive” and “anti-American.”

Following the executive order, the National Park Service (NPS) reportedly scrubbed information from its exhibits about the great abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. That network of secret routes and safe houses for freedom seekers escaping to the Northern U.S. in the late-18th and 19th centuries and Tubman, the network’s most famous “conductor,” have become symbols of resistance to enslavement. On its site, NPS replaced a large photo of Tubman with images of postage stamps highlighting “Black/white cooperation.” It later walked back the changes after public outrage. 

Around the same time, NPS removed the Rio Vista Reception Center in Socorro, Texas, the most recently designated Latinx National Historic Landmark, from its site. That landmark honors the contributions of Braceros, millions of guest workers from Mexico who came to the U.S. to mitigate farm labor shortages beginning during World War II. 

Experts warn that the Trump administration’s actions will also affect future preservation activities and education programming, threatening to reverse a decade-long institutional shift toward expanding the nation’s preservation system to include more sites and stories representing the nation’s communities of color. 

“This executive order, which restricts federal funding for projects addressing systemic inequality, directly assaults the truth of our nation’s history,” says Sehila Mota Casper, executive director of Latinos in Heritage Conservation (LHC), the leading nonprofit organization working to preserve Latinx places in the United States. “By limiting funding and erasing Latinx narratives, it silences millions and jeopardizes the preservation of crucial histories.” 

The administration’s actions follow similar efforts made during Trump’s first term, when he issued a similar executive order that sought to ban what he called “divisive concepts” about race from federal institutions. In 2020, Trump also created the 1776 Commission, which aimed to promote “patriotic education,” a whitewashed version of the nation’s past that obscures systemic racism. He revived the commission this year in a January 2025 executive order.

The actions also mirror state-level efforts in recent years. Nationwide, more than 20 states have introduced legislation or already have legislation in place restricting the teaching of race and the histories of America’s communities of color. While Republican-led states have been at the forefront of this regressive movement, many Democratic-led states have also moved similar legislation forward. At least 44 states have begun debating legislation that would limit how schools can teach students about race, according to an analysis from EdWeek.

Williams launched Black History Saturdays in response to Oklahoma’s House Bill 1775, which was signed into law in 2021 and bans eight vague-sounding concepts and is meant to restrict discussion of race and power in the classroom. Among the prohibited classroom content is anything that could cause students to “feel discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish.” 

“But history is uncomfortable,” says Williams. “Especially when you have been the aggressor in history and you don’t want to come out looking like the bad person. But the thing is, we are still operating under the same system that protected slavery, and when students learn that, they’re going to want to change it.”

Historians, educators, and advocates argue that undermining efforts to enact systemic change could be the purpose of Trump’s attacks on historical truth. Restricting education on race helps prevent Americans from developing an understanding of racism, how it has been maintained, and how it continues to function through the nation’s legal system and institutions, and through systematized violence. The status quo serves figures such as those in Trump’s administration, who have accumulated wealth and power thanks to the nation’s systematized inequities; they are invested in continuing it. Similarly, research has shown that Trump’s agenda appeals especially to white, Christian, and male voters who are concerned about threats to their status. 

Williams says that while the federal government’s agenda and its reasoning are part of a grim trend, the recent crackdown has also “created the right time for us to organize and learn how we can protect our histories.” Black History Saturdays and LHC remain committed to teaching about racism and uplifting the histories of communities of color through their community-based education programs. 

Black History Saturdays gives students of all backgrounds and ages in Tulsa a chance to learn about the historical struggles and contributions of African Americans at day-long monthly convenings in a repurposed schoolhouse. When Williams launched the program in 2023, it served 120 students. Now, entering its third year, there are nearly 400 regular attendees. The group is divided into eight classes sorted by age. The youngest participants are preschoolers, and the adult classes include a 90-year-old attendee. The program also offers free breakfast and lunch to participants, where a chef “teaches Black history through his food,” says Williams. 

Meanwhile, LHC, a nationwide organization, offers online workshops to community groups and educators to help them lead Latinx historic preservation and education efforts in their communities. These workshops are based on LHC-designed curricula, and the organization offers a downloadable Latinx Preservation Toolkit, which provides step-by-step guidance on historic designation processes to equip communities with the knowledge to lead preservation efforts.

To hold the federal government accountable, LHC also issued the first phase of its Equity Study in April 2025. That study examines how and why Latinx heritage sites are underrepresented in official efforts to recognize and preserve historic sites. It also calls for increasing funding and attention to such work to counter the Trump administration’s regressive approach. Williams says she sees community-of-color-led efforts like these as “part of a national movement to reclaim education, memory, and power.”

For historian Ida Jones, author of Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, D.C.: Education and Activism in Logan Circle, community-led programs focused on Black or Latinx histories follow in the tradition of earlier educators of color who taught in their communities when the government failed or refused to do so. She draws a line back to the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when a generation of Black Americans whose parents had endured enslavement began exploring their identities as African Americans. Education was an essential part of this project.

Mary McLeod Bethune, a teacher and civil rights activist, and Carter G. Woodson, a historian and creator of Black History Month, were two of the movement’s most prominent leaders. “What Bethune did, what Woodson did, was create a curriculum to teach the African American community, who didn’t know their history,” Jones explains. Importantly, this generation of educators, who Jones says stood “on the cusp of enslavement and freedom, of property and citizenship,” integrated their ancestors’ African pasts, their experiences of enslavement and racism, and the ways they had endured and won their freedom, into a uniquely African American narrative. They were “building this case for their humanity at the same time in which they were trying to embrace their citizenship,” says Jones.

While the Trump administration tries to paint Black histories and the histories of other communities of color as “anti-American,” Jones says teaching these histories has always been a deeply American project. In Bethune and Woodson’s time, Jones says, “They sought to be patriots of the country in which they now lived and be integrated into the fabric or the tapestry of that narrative. African Americans never sought to stand opposed or outside of the conversation of American history and culture. They saw themselves and their children as citizens, as patriots, as residents, and Americans.”

Williams also takes inspiration from the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, a series of about 2,500 schools mainly located in the U.S. South that offered summer programs to Black students of all ages. Those programs were meant to supplement the substandard education that many Black students received during the Jim Crow era, and helped the community improve its social, political, and economic status. 

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto, director of education and outreach at LHC, says her organization is also taking cues from the past in its opposition to Trump’s attacks. “When you look at the history of education, we’ve been here before,” she says. ”So, we’re going to get through this, and we’re going to get through it through acts of resistance, like staying our course, and providing tools, and supporting educators.”