Trump’s Whitewashing Of Racial History Is Earmark Of Tyranny
The trump administration continues its tyrannical crusade to sanitize American history and erase the brutal, ugly reality of hundreds of years of enslavement and its enduring effect on the nation.
The administration’s latest effort was released just days after the nation’s 250th birthday in a report on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It said the museum has promoted “extreme political activism” and that the Smithsonian “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”
As usual, trump believes he can craft the truth, a tactic historically used by tyrants to rewrite history and restore a phony patriotism. Trump is continuing a policy outlined in his 2025 executive order that barred federally owned or controlled historic sites from displaying information to “disparage Americans past or living” and to focus on the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
The effort to clean up what trump sees as public, unsavory moments in history has lately taken the form of “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums that highlight trump’s sense of a white Christian American history.
The trucks are part of the program created by “Freedom 250,” an organization created by trump without congressional approval to bypass the “America250” celebration which had been funded and approved by Congress. Trucks were scheduled to make nearly 100 stops, in North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wyoming through July 4.
Visitors to the trucks are greeted by an AI-generated George Washington who asks, “Are you willing to pledge your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor for the American cause? The fate of country, the fate of liberty, is in your hands.”
Some exhibits concede that enslavement happened, but displays point to the supposed positive impacts of slavery on American values. Material designed by Prager University or PragerU minimize the horrors and traumas of slavery as minor historical footnotes.
PragerU is a right wing, nonprofit advocacy group and media organization that creates content promoting conservative and pro-capitalist viewpoints on various political, economic, and sociological topics. Despite its name, Prager U is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
Material supplied by PragerU to schools across the country offers numerous misleading statements, such as Israel is “the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations;” climate change deniers are tantamount to Jewish resistance fighters who rose up against the Nazis; and British colonists, who brutally ruled the Indian subcontinent, were benevolent reformers trying to save indigenous people from their own “harmful traditions.”
The trucks offer minimal mentions of African American heroes like Frederick Douglass, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks as among “50 American Heroes” who are predominantly white men.
The destruction of Native American culture is mentioned nowhere but the visitor can falsely learn “The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent.”
At the end of the exhibit, visitors are treated to a video of trump sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office while he calls America “the greatest force for freedom, justice, equality and prosperity in the history of the world.”
Trump recently scored a court victory in his sanitize America campaign when an appeals court ruled the administration can reinstall interpretive panels that downplay the history of slavery at the site of President George Washington’s home in Philadelphia.
At the National Park Service, references to Harriet Tubman were briefly removed from an Underground Railroad webpage, “enslaved African Americans” became “enslaved workers,” and information about Benjamin Franklin’s history as a slave owner vanished but was restored as a result of public backlash.
Contrasting Truths
Most people are adults who can hold two contrasting truths at once; that America has long offered tremendous opportunity while it also continues to live in the long shadow of slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism.
Truth is the cornerstone of a democracy and it is strengthened and not undermined by reality. Truth makes the system stronger and not weaker, it can inspire and enlighten, despite what trump claims.
One particularly brutal example of the nation’s violent, racist history would most certainly be censored by trump.
On the spring day of May 19, 1918, in Lowndes County, Ga., a crowd of several hundred approving spectators watched as a pregnant Black woman, Mary Turner, 33, was lynched, burned, and shot before the killers cut out her fetus and stomped out the life of it on the ground. Turner’s crime was that she stood up to the racist community for her husband who was lynched after he was accused of murdering a white plantation owner.
Mary Turner’s lynching was described differently in white and black newspapers. The white press made no mention Turner’s pregnancy or the murder of her unborn baby, while black reports emphasized it. After the incident, the Associated Press wrote that Mary Turner had made “unwise remarks” about the murder of her husband, and that “the people, in their indignant mood, took exception to her remarks, as well as her attitude.”
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A spree of mob violence, known as the “Lynching Rampage of 1918,” followed the Turner lynching and continued for a week in mid-May in Brooks and Lowndes counties. At least 11 African Americans were lynched. Other bodies of African-American males were found but not identified, and others disappeared.
No charges were ever brought against suspected participants in the events, one of the deadliest waves of vigilantism in Georgia history. From 1880 to 1930, as many as 550 people were lynched in Georgia by mobs. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) documented 4,075 lynchings in southern states between 1877 and 1950.
The violence of the “Lynching Rampage of 1918” led to an unsuccessful national crusade to make lynching a federal crime. Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer, R-Mo., a civil rights activist who served in congress from 1911 to 1933, sponsored an anti-lynching law but it was killed in the Senate by Southern Democrats.
Lynching was not made a federal crime until March 29, 2022, with the passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act. The act designated lynching as a federal hate crime and was named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
Turner Remembered
A marker was erected in Mary Turner’s honor in 2010. Like other memorials to civil rights martyrs, the marker was later vandalized and was periodically riddled with bullet holes.
Mary Turner was eight months pregnant when she spoke publicly against the lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner, the day before. In anger, a mob snatched Turner and gathered at Folsom’s Bridge 16 miles north of Valdosta, Ga. They bound the woman’s feet, hanged her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her, and burned the clothes off her body.
Turner was still alive when the mob used a large butcher’s knife, sliced her stomach and cut the unborn baby from her body. When it fell, a member of the mob crushed the crying baby’s head with his foot. The mob then riddled Turner’s body with hundreds of bullets. No member of the mob was ever held accountable for the lynching of Turner and her unborn baby.
Turner’s husband, Hayes Turner, 26, was accused of being an accomplice in the killing of a Morven, Ga., plantation owner, Hampton Smith, 25. Smith was known for his extreme abuse of Black farm workers. Turner was placed in jail but the county sheriff and a clerk took him out and while on the way to another jail, Turner was seized by a mob and lynched near the Okapilco Creek in Brooks County. Turner’s body was hung on a main road for a day before it was cut down.
Smith got workers after he would bail Black people accused of petty crimes out of jail and then require them to work off the fine at his farm. He paid for the former prisoners’ food and board.
One of the workers, Sidney Johnson, was bailed out after paying the police a $30 fine for his conviction for “playing dice.” While under Smith’s care, Johnson was beaten but endured, including one time for refusing to work while sick. After Johnson shot Smith and his wife at their house, he ran and hid for several days. A large manhunt conducted by a white mob killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. More than 500 black residents fled the violence even though whites threatened to kill black workers who tried to leave.
Others killed during the rampage on May 17, included African Americans, Will Head and Will Thompson, who were caught by the mob and were lynched the same night. Their bodies were riddled with more than 700 bullets.
Julius Jones was captured and lynched as was Chime Riley, a black man who had no known connection to Smith. He was thrown into the Little River in Brooks County to drown near Barney; turpentine cups were tied to his hands and legs to weigh him down.
Simon Schuman was taken from his house and was never again seen although it is believed that he was lynched. His family was driven out of the house, and the interior was destroyed.
A man named Leamon Wright was arrested in 1918 on charges of murdering Hampton Smith and assaulting his wife. Wright was held in Florida and tried in a court in Savannah, Ga., for alleged safety reasons. Wright was executed by hanging in Chatham County Jail on June 3, 1921, and claimed to his death that he was innocent.
Public perception of the extent and cruelty of lynchings was fueled by Mary Turner’s murder and also the murder of Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old African American farmhand. Washington was lynched in the county seat of Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916.
The teen was accused of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in rural Robinson, Texas. After being found guilty and sentenced to death, he was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. Washington was then paraded through the street, while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco’s city hall.
More than 10,000 spectators, including city officials, police and children, gathered while members of the mob cut off Washington’s fingers and hung him over a bonfire after saturating him with coal oil. Washington was repeatedly lowered and raised over the fire for about two hours. After the fire was extinguished, his charred torso was dragged through the town.
A professional photographer took pictures which were printed and sold as postcards in Waco.
“Shouts of delight” were reported as Washington burned and the spectacle drew a crowd estimated at 10,000 to 15,000, including Mayor John Dollins and the Police Chief Guy McNamara, although lynching was illegal in Texas. Some Texans saw participation in a lynching as a rite of passage for young white men.
On May 11, 1953, an F5 tornado tore through Downtown Waco, killing 114 people and injuring 593 others. Some local African American residents saw the tornado as divine retribution for the lynching of Jesse Washington over 30 years earlier.
On the centennial of the event in May 2016, the mayor of Waco held a formal ceremony to apologize to Washington’s relatives and the African American community. A historical marker has been installed to memorialize the lynching.
