These activists are 'flooding the zone with Black history' to protest Trump's attacks on DEI
Source: The Guardian
Sat 3 May 2025 09.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 3 May 2025 09.02 EDT
A coalition of civil rights groups have launched a weeklong initiative to condemn Donald Trump’s attacks on Black history, including recent executive orders targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC. The national Freedom to Learn campaign is being led by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a social justice thinktank co-founded by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw is a leading expert on critical race theory (CRT), a framework used to analyze racism’s structural impact.
She has fought against book bans, restraints on racial history teaching and other anti-DEI efforts since the beginning of the Republican-led campaign against CRT in 2020. “Our goal this week has been to flood the zone, as we call it, with Black history,” Crenshaw said about the campaign. “We have long understood that the attacks on ideas germinating from racial justice were not about the specific targets of each attack … [but are] an effort to impose a specific narrative about the United States of America, one that marginalizes, and even erases, its more difficult chapters,” she added.
The weeklong campaign will conclude with a demonstration and prayer vigil in front of NMAAHC on 3 May. Leading up to the protest, AAPF, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and six other advocacy groups signed onto a statement criticizing Trump’s “attempted mass erasure of Black history and culture”, according to a press release published 28 April. In March, Trump ordered an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network, in order to demolish what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”. He singled out NAAMHC, a museum that has been lauded since its opening in 2016.
The coalition’s affirmation read, in part: “We affirm that Black history is American history, without which we cannot understand our country’s fight for freedom or secure a more democratic future. We must protect our history not just in books, schools, libraries, and universities, but also in museums, memorials, and remembrances that are sites of our national memory.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/03/black-history-trump-freedom-to-learn
= new reply since forum marked as read
There was even what was considered one of the, if not "the greatest film of all time" that told the story of one such oligarch -
This is the first time I have seen the below "trailer preview" clip (brought to you by the then-young and brilliant writer, director, producer, and actor Orson Welles, who made the film!) -
(and this was purportedly the story of William Randolph Hearst, media baron, who was royally pissed about this film
)
Bottom line: What is going on today is nothing new.
Coming from a British publication!
