Why we must tell the story of slavery at the Smithsonian, President Trump | Opinion

Sometimes, while on our earthly journey, we often take things for granted. Things like just waking up in the morning, breathing unaided, having loving family and friends, being an American, living in a democracy and just feeling good. Period.

But the older I get, the more I realize how important it is not to take these, and so many other blessings, for granted. I understand how important it is to stop and smell the flowers, to watch a bird in flight, to listen to its song. I know that each sunrise and sunset is different and that we will never see today’s masterpieces again.

As Americans, we are going through some scary times, and it may be hard for some of us to see our blessings. After all, our institutions are being dismantled, our history is being changed or wiped out completely.

Just recently, I saw a clip where President Trump said he wanted our museums to be “fun” places to visit. He wants to take away the truth about slavery and paint that period as a time when enslaved Black people had fun being beaten, starved and raped.

I don’t understand how he plans to change the story of slavery from something so horribly unjust to something light-hearted and fun. The story of slavery is etched on the heart of many African Americans.

We don’t want to forget the stories that were passed down through generations – stories that my grandmother told me, stories that her grandmother told her and so on. Much of our history isn’t pretty. But it is our history.

We must remember the stories and keep passing them on. To forget our history or pretend that it never happened is a very dangerous thing: It can happen again.

During President Trump’s first term, in 2017, he visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, a museum that I and thousands of others helped build through our donations. He said it was an honor to visit the museum, which he noted was “a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms.”

His words are quite different today. Consider what he posted on Truth Social earlier this month, the day after calling for a sweeping review of the Smithsonian Institution museums: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

I don’t know what caused the president to flip. Maybe he just doesn’t know the story of slavery. Maybe he doesn’t understand what life for the newly captured Africans must have been like, living in the belly of the slave ships. There, human beings were chained together, made to lie in their own filth for the long trip across the Atlantic, from the shores of Africa to the shores of America.

Perhaps the story of slavery is too horrible for even him to imagine. But museums are the keepers of our most treasured history. They are the keepers of our art, and house the story of America – how it was born and all the storms it has come through. Like the taking of land from Native Americans, who were here long before our founding fathers and African slaves.

These are not all happy stories. But they are our stories. No one, not even a president, should be allowed to get rid of them.

When I hear about such actions being taken by our president, I wonder why his advisers don’t say something. They see something, but they say nothing. These are the men and women who were elected to protect our country, its institutions and its people.

I am not one of those people, wearing rose-colored glasses, who talks about the “good old days” of America. Nope. I am an 87-year-old African American woman, just four generations away from slavery, who has lived through Jim Crow (an updated version of slavery) and who has seen the burning crosses (a Ku Klux Klan signature), as late as the 1970s, right here in Miami, Florida. The burning cross was a scare tactic meant to keep Black folks in our “place.”

So, to say America was perfect in the good old days, is a frightening myth. It scares me that I could wake up one morning and find myself right back in what the president calls a GREAT America. We were, and still are, a diverse nation of people who love our country and who have always tried to make it better.

Were we perfect back then? Far from it. But we had hope. And that hope came to us from some of the most surprising places, like President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.

Who would have thought that a known Texas racist could change his mind and sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most profound laws of my lifetime. The act, signed into law by Johnson on July 2, 1964, outlawed segregation in businesses and public places, including schools, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools and libraries.

President Johnson’s dream for America didn’t happen overnight. It would take the blood, sweat and lives of many Americans before we saw a glimmer of light. But we kept on moving forward. Because we kept on moving, changes were made for the good of all Americans.

I remember the turbulent 1960s well. It was in 1966, two years after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, that my life changed completely, when I was hired as the Miami Herald’s first Black in a “white color position.” I was hired as a file clerk in the paper’s library, or morgue, as it was called. It would be four and a half years later, in 1970, before I would become the paper’s first African American female reporter.

I know. I’ve told you my story before. The point is this: We can’t go back. As a nation we must move forward. We should not want to make America GREAT AGAIN. That’s because our country was never greater than it is right now. It took a lot of hard work to get here. So, our job should be to make America GREATER.

But we can’t do this by tearing down our history and dismantling our museums because the truth might hurt somebody’s feelings.

We need to get real, people. We need to stop taking our rights and privileges for granted. Rather, we need to cherish and guard them.

And we need to be thankful for them, just as we are for the air we breathe, or the sunsets and sunrises we see each day. Just as these God-created miracles are a blessing to us, so is our democracy.

Let’s not take it for granted.