As America turns 250, the fight over Black history intensifies

Delano Massey

Photo illustration of a collage of photos of the March on Washington, Frederick Douglass, the Black Panthers, Rosa Parks, Barack Obama, and the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge arranged to look like an American flag. — Photo illustration: Brendan Lynch. Photos: Getty Images

America's 250th anniversary is colliding with a renewed battle over Black history, just as the White House moves to both smooth over and narrow how race and equity are discussed nationwide with rollbacks of diversity initiatives.

Why it matters: Black History Month — in its 100th year since Carter G. Woodson's 1926 Negro History Week — arrives amid an administration actively shrinking institutions that preserve and teach that history.

The Trump administration has said that diversity initiatives and racial equity efforts have unfairly advantaged Black and Latino Americans at the expense of white Americans.

Driving the news: Following presidential custom, Trump issued a National Black History Month proclamation on Feb. 3 that maintained "black history is not distinct from American history — rather, the history of Black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story."

The proclamation, which the White House tied to the nation's upcoming 250th anniversary, celebrates Black Americans' historic contributions.

Yes, but: Its rhetoric, critics say, stands in tension with the Trump administration's recent actions, raising questions about whether commemoration without context ultimately obscures more than it honors.

A National Urban League roundtable last month warned that rollbacks of voting rights, diversity initiatives and how history is taught are reinforcing fears that hard-won civil-rights protections are at risk.

What they're saying: "This isn't a break from American history. It's the continuation of it," Michael Harriot, author of "Black AF History," tells Axios.

"The country was founded on the idea that some people get to define freedom and democracy — and others are excluded from it."

State of play: Federal agencies and cultural institutions have deleted or revised Black history content in response to the president's anti-DEI mandate, which the administration has said is aimed at restoring neutrality.

Recent Axios polling shows these changes are resonating beyond policy circles, shifting a shared historical narrative to a fragmented, individualized one.

Case in point: The National Park Service recently removed or revised dozens of signs and displays related to the mistreatment of Native Americans and slavery — including an exhibit in Philadelphia detailing the enslaved people George Washington held at the President's House.

Onyx Impact's Blackout Report found more than 6,700 federal datasets deleted, including data on maternal mortality, sickle cell disease and environmental exposure in historically redlined neighborhoods.
At the same time, federal and state policy pressure has prompted colleges and universities receiving federal funding to dismantle or downsize DEI offices and programs once central to campus equity efforts.

The bottom line: For Marc H. Morial — who grew up with Ku Klux Klan threats aimed at his family during the civil-rights era — this moment doesn't feel unprecedented. It feels familiar.

"I've seen this movie before," he says. "In the '60s they stood up. In the 2020s, we've got to stand up."
Morial says this administration's conviction to pursue these "repressive policies" is not necessarily going to abate.
"It's a moment where people understand that the nation is being damaged, that our future is being taken away, that the American Dream is being stolen, that we're on the brink of tyranny and authoritarianism."