Before dawn in Baltimore on Friday, Reverend Robert Turner, senior pastor of the Church of the temple of Empowerment AME, set out to walk 43 miles from his church to the National Museum of History and Culture of American Africans of the Smithsonian in the National Mall in Washington, DC, DC.
Turner, who has made Baltimore’s trip to DC more than 30 times to ask for repairs for blacks throughout the United States due to the consequences of slavery, made the 14 -hour trip this week to protest what he says it is an attempt by the Trump administration to erase an important American history. For him, the future of the museum that he and many other black people call with love of the “Black” worth each step.
“If you don’t know the horrors we go through, demons, then you may not see the need to repair,” Turner said. “It is important that President Trump knows this issue of saving Blacksonian and the United States repair issue, and creating a repair culture is very important to save the soul of the United States.”
The context: the artifacts of decades related to slavery and civil rights are rotating outside the exhibitions in the museum as a possible revision of the White House progresses.
At the end of March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that demanded in part that the museum withdraw any exhibition that “divides Americans depending on the race.” But now, the White House says that it is not involved in any change in the museum, while the Democrats in Congress are playing the alarm, signing a letter and introducing legislation to protect the reference points from civil rights.
NBC News entered the museum and found at least 32 artifacts that were once displayed have been eliminated.
They include Harriet Tubman’s hymn book full of gospels that it is believed that had sung while leading people enslaved to freedom through the underground railroad, as well as a fabric made by enslaved people and a photo of the public group of the Hip-Hop group.
The “narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass” was also eliminated, the memories of one of the most important leaders in the abolition movement. Both articles were given to Smithsonian.
In a statement, the White House spokeswoman, Lindsey Halligan, said: “The White House had no participation in eliminating any exhibition from the National Museum of African -American History and Culture or any other Smithsonian institution. They did it on their own.”
The Museum withdrew criticism, saying on its website that “the statements that objects have been eliminated for reasons other than standard loan agreements or museum practices are false.” He also listed 11 new artifacts that will be exhibited at the end of this month, including a photograph focused on how the mass imprisonment impacts black people, a painting that represents a figure of Ku Klux Klan, and the works of art dedicated to Emmett Till, a 14 -year -old black child of Chicago murdered by white men in 1955 in 1955 visiting the family in Mississippi after the teenager after the teenager, He agreed to try to try to work with a white woman with a white woman.
In an email to NBC News, the museum reiterated that rotating objects is normal.
But Turner is not convinced. “Now we have to say enough is enough, and the United States is better than this, black and white,” he said. “We are stronger than this. If our children can support being lynching, then white children can support a classroom that teaches that the United States used to lynch children.”
Liz Brazelton, the owner of a newspaper connected to the Oscar winning film “12 years old, is not convinced either. She is the great -grandson of the lawyer who helped free Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and forced to slavery.
“I grew up with the newspapers,” said Brazelton. “The most important thing in his newspapers was the fact that he helped free this man who was a free man. And it is simply an incredible story. And in the center of Louisiana, it is a fairly prominent story. And I am very proud of that.”
He gave one of his great -grandfather to the museum in September 2015 with a 10 -year loan. The museum sent him a letter in March, before the end of the period, saying: “We have decided to advance with the return a little earlier to coincide with our rotation schedule of the internal gallery.”
The letter was sent two weeks before Trump signed the executive order aimed at exhibitions at the Smithsonian, which raised a red flag for Brazelton.
“When I saw the executive order, I asked me if they might know that something was going to happen and they rotated it early because it was slavery, the entire exhibition,” he said.
The Smithsonian rejected the NBC News request for an interview. But he repeated in an email that the newspaper movement was a scheduled rotation to “allow the necessary rest after a prolonged visualization period.”
Brazelton said they never told him between 2016 and 2025 that his family’s diary was removed from the exhibition or rotated. She believes she had stayed at the exhibition until recently.
Reverend Amos C. Brown, an outstanding pastor and civil rights leader, lent two of his books to the museum when he opened in 2016. The articles included the Bible of his father, who is over 100 years old and was taken by Brown during the protests with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as a book about the history of black people who was written in the nineteenth century.
“I was feeling that through this museum, the United States will see me, you will see black people,” Brown said. “We have been and we are architects, designers of great things … We took a negative and turned it positive, and telling the story of how people achieved great things despite oppression, despite those evil things that were done to us, so it is what that museum represents.”
Earlier this year, the Smithsonian sent an email saying that he would return his books. The museum called him a “standard practice”, adding that the loan expired in May. Even so, Brown called that explanation an excuse, pointing to NBC News that the museum has always chosen to renew the loan so far.
“I feel that it is very inhuman, disrespectful and frankly unfair,” he said about the decision to put an end to the loan.
After its public rejection, the museum offered to keep the books permanently, according to a letter reviewed by NBC News.
The broader controversy is becoming more and more political. The Democrats of the House of Representatives require Vice President JD Vance, who is now at the Board of the National Museum of African -American History and Culture, does not take measures to review the museum. In a letter, legislators said: “This flagrant attempt to erase black history is unacceptable and must be stopped.”
The representative Terri Sewell, a Alabama Democrat who is in a camera committee that performs the supervision of the Smithsonian institution, was among the legislators who signed the letter. “Telling the truth means sharing the good and bad. And if we don’t tell our stories, who will tell our stories?” She said.
Meanwhile, Turner plans to continue making his monthly pilgrimage, at a Baltimore schedule to Washington, DC, to emphasize that the museum’s artifacts are removed from the exhibitions and demand repairs for black people throughout the nation.
“Our story can’t die, no matter who is in the White House,” he said.
