We shouldn’t try to erase history. Are you listening, President Trump? | Opinion

There seems to be no shame in the Trump administration. I say this because recently I read that Trump’s Justice Department is removing important information about the convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists from its website. But maybe “shame” isn’t the right word for what this administration is doing to America. What seems to be happening — right in plain sight — is that America’s love of the truth is dying. Rapidly.

According to a recent story in the Philadelphia Inquirer reprinted in the Miami Herald, the Justice Department has removed “hundreds of pages from its website detailing prosecutions and convictions of people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol.”

The story said the action is the “latest move by President Donald Trump’s administration to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, a failed attempt by his supporters to overturn the 2020 election results.”

Trying to rewrite our history is like saying that it never happened. To me that’s not a rewrite job — that’s just plain lying. Don’t the history-rewrite-people know that America was watching on that fateful day? Don’t they know we see what they are doing now? Don’t they care?

Apparently not.

That’s because while we see what this administration is doing, we aren’t doing anything to stop it. Why is that? Is there some invisible monster casting a spell on our citizens and our lawmakers that makes us oblivious to what is happening to our country? If not, then why on earth, would we stand by and watch as our country digresses to the days when we struggled to be a country of truth and justice and good morals. No, we didn’t always reach our goal. People died and entire communities were burned to the ground as we tried to reach them. But we kept trying. And we kept hope alive.

As an African American woman who was born just 73 years post slavery, I have lived through a lot. I know what it feels like when I was a child to have my momma tell my brother Adam and me before we left home for a day of shopping, to “use” the bathroom before leaving, because there will be nowhere for us to relieve ourselves downtown.

And I know what it’s like to have to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Momma packed in her pocketbook (for those of you who don’t know, that was her purse) along with a small mayonnaise jar filled with ice that melted into cool water by the time we needed a drink. That was because we Negroes, or Coloreds, as we were called back then, weren’t allowed to drink from the “White” water fountains. And because sometimes, there weren’t any “Colored” water fountains available to us.

Just as slavery was a blight on young Amnerica, the Jim Crow and/or segregation also left its ugly print on our country. We struggled hard as a nation, post slavery. It wasn’t a pretty time for us. Even today, as I remind some of you, and inform some others who are not so aware of our history, about how it was for some of us back in the day, I can still feel the sting of those times. In other words, the memory of the suffering of those dark days still hurts. Yet, as dark as it was back then, those times are still a part of our American history, and we should never try to erase it.

Rather, we should use our history as a reminder of how far we have come as a nation and learn from our mistakes. We should use our history as a teaching tool to show our younger generations what we can become if we continue to learn from our past.

And we should never be ashamed. History was not meant to make us ashamed. Rather, I believe history is meant to be used as a steppingstone for America to become an even greater nation.

The road from our nation’s birth to now has been watered with the blood and tears of men and women willing to die for a country that would one day be the envy of the entire world. We must not let their dying be in vain. As Americans, we must be proud of the strides we have made as a nation over the past 250 years. We must stop trying to bury, and in some cases, erase completely, our history. Which brings me back to President Trump’s administration’s attempts to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, 2021.

It is bad enough that we sat back and watched as books were banned. And as teachers were forbidden to teach Black history in their classrooms. And as certain historical incidents such as slavery, were deleted from our schools’ textbooks.

Who are we? Why are we letting these things happen in America? What will we tell our children about Jan. 6? Or about any other important moments in the history of America?

If we can’t count on our lawmakers to preserve our country’s history, maybe we will have to go back to the old-fashioned way that we African Americans used to keep our history alive when we weren’t allowed to learn how to read or write. We remembered.

And we told our stories orally, passing them from one generation to the next.

The Trump administration can try to erase from the annals of history what happened that day in our nation’s capital, but it can’t be erased from the minds of the people who were witnesses to that day. The story of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, will be preserved because it is written on the breastplate of the heart of every American who was watching as a riotous mob stormed America’s Capitol and tried to dismantle our democracy, and failed.

They failed. And now, they don’t want future generations of Americans to know what happened. But some of us know, because we were there. We watched in person, and from our living rooms as our televisions recorded it in living color. So, while the Trump administration tries to erase what happened that day, we know. And we won’t keep quiet. We will tell our children and grandchildren. And they can tell their children, and their children can tell their children. And so on and so on.

“Yes, my children,” we will tell them, “the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, failed. But truth prevailed.”