Trump Is Editing Slavery and Genocide Out of America's 250th Birthday — The Last Time This Happened, It Built Jim Crow
Trump Is Editing Slavery and Genocide Out of America's 250th Birthday — The Last Time This Happened, It Built Jim Crow
As federal review pulls exhibits across the country, organizers are mobilizing a nationwide protest, "All of U.S. 250" two weeks before the Fourth of July to contest who gets to tell the story.
Jun 20, 2026
The Trump administration has big plans for America’s 250th birthday, and those plans involve a lot of bunting and a truly impressive amount of revisionism. Earlier last year, the White House issued a directive to “restore sanity” to American history, which is the sort of phrase that should make anyone who survived a high school history class a little nervous. Since then, museum exhibits across the country have been pulled into federal review. Parks Department staff leaked the number of displays on the chopping block. The Smithsonian is under pressure, and even the history of climate change has apparently become too inconvenient to leave hanging on the wall.
The people sanitizing our 250th are running a playbook that worked beautifully the last time it was used, and the only force that ever beat it was an organized movement.
Two Birthday Parties
I recently sat down with Nicole Carty, co-founder and executive director of Get Free, who has spent more than a decade organizing in everything from Occupy Wall Street to the Movement for Black Lives. She is, by her own cheerful admission, a “strangely eternal optimist,” which is a useful disposition for someone planning a nationwide protest two weeks before the Fourth of July.
That protest is All of U.S. 250, a day of mass mobilization set for June 27th, with fifty events stretching across the country. As Carty framed it, there are two competing versions of this anniversary on the table. One is a federal production we politely called “tacky,” a whitewashed pageant built to shrink slavery, genocide, and land theft down to a footnote. The other is a chance for everyone who still wants a free and equal America to show up and say so out loud.
The Movement Most of Us Were Never Taught
In school, we talk endlessly about the civil rights movement. But we barely talk about the one that made it possible.
Carty walked me through the abolitionist movement, which she considers the single most explanatory chapter in American history for understanding this moment. In roughly three decades starting in the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society grew into a mass grassroots organization that, by her count, activated as many as a quarter million people. They took slavery from a problem most Americans assumed would linger for another two centuries and turned it into the urgent moral question of the age.
They pulled that off, she explained, by reclaiming the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, they argued, meant all of them, which left slavery flatly incompatible with the country’s own founding promise. That case landed so hard that when the Confederacy seceded, its leaders openly admitted the founders had blundered by writing equality into the document at all. Their new nation, they announced, would rest its cornerstone on white supremacy instead.
The movement pushed Lincoln toward the Emancipation Proclamation, then used its grassroots muscle to win the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Carty calls this the second founding, the moment a slaveholding republic was rebuilt into something that could, for the first time, hold the shape of a multiracial democracy. “We know we can do it,” she told me, “because we’ve done it before.”
The Lost Cause Was the First Whitewash
Now, about that playbook.
The reason so many Americans, Carty included, grew up being taught the Civil War was about “states’ rights” and a noble “way of life” is that someone engineered it that way. As she pointed out, the Daughters of the Confederacy spent the early 20th century manufacturing a false story about the war. That is when the Confederate statues went up, a full fifty years after Appomattox rather than in its grief-stricken aftermath, and that fiction was used to justify Jim Crow and strip Black Southerners of the vote.
Erasing history is a rehearsed tactic, and the rehearsal is running again. According to Carty, the same impulse now drives efforts to flip the 14th Amendment, an amendment written to dismantle white supremacy, into a tool for cementing it through attacks on birthright citizenship, the Voting Rights Act, and race-conscious college admissions.
When I mentioned I was calling from Boston, we landed on the obvious parallel. The abolitionists here who defied the Fugitive Slave Act left a blueprint, one I made a whole video about earlier this year, for communities now resisting ICE arrests. Same logic, same courage, same country. Everything old really is new again.
Show Up
So here is the invitation. On June 27th, All of U.S. 250 will turn out alongside partners like 50501 and Next 250, which is anchoring the flagship gathering in Washington, D.C. Carty sees it as a way to deepen the No Kings energy into something with a destination, a positive vision instead of a list of grievances.
The pendulum swings back. It always has. Carty’s one warning is that it does not swing back on its own, and the generation organized enough to grab it gets to decide where it stops. The abolitionists figured that out a century and a half ago. We have a birthday coming up. Seems like a good time to remember what actually moved this country the last time.