Can This Chicago Preacher Save ‘The Blacksonian’?

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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April 8, 2025

By Rev. Dorothy S. Boulware, Word in Black

President Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity has attacked nearly everything touching on race, from freezing federal investigations of civil rights violations to scrubbing Harriet Tubman from a website on the Underground Railroad.

But when he came for the Smithsonian Museum’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. — a.k.a. The Blacksonian — Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, came up with a backup plan.

On March 27, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” declaring NMAAHC — one of the most popular attractions in Washington, with some 3 million visitors a year — and a few others as institutions that divide America. The order states that the museums undermine the nation’s “remarkable” history by casting it “in a negative light,” and directs Vice President JD Vance to clear the museum of its liberal “ideology.”

[…]

Enter Rev. Moss — and the Trinity congregation.

Last Sunday, Moss came to the rescue of NMAAHC by announcing that Trinity “is placing the museum in our annual budget.” He then asked parishioners to join him by donating $25 to the museum, the price of a basic membership, to show their faith.

It’s good news, given that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is not a federal institution and is principally funded by donations. Only a small portion of its financial support comes from the federal government.

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