In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”Before continuing, it is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”After reading his post, I thought of the historian Lonnie Bunch, the current secretary of the Smithsonian—the first Black person to lead the institution since its founding in 1846—and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In his 2016 speech at the grand opening of the museum, Bunch thanked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for their support. “We are at this moment because of the backing of the United States Congress and the White House,” he said, turning to them both onstage. It’s sobering to consider how different things are today.Bunch has been fighting efforts by the Trump administration to bring the Smithsonian into conformity with the MAGA vision of American history, and people familiar with his views say he is committed to protecting the intellectual integrity and independence of the Smithsonian. But how much longer, given Trump’s ever more antagonistic position, will Bunch be able to withstand the presidential pressure? On Truth Social, Trump said he had “instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.” A recent letter to the Smithsonian from the White House states that the review will be completed and a final report issued by early 2026, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.”Trump’s Truth Social comment on slavery was unsettling for me not only because I am the descendant of enslaved people, and not only because I was born and raised in New Orleans, which was once the center of the domestic slave trade, but also because I am an American who believes that the only way to understand this country—the only way to love this country—is to tell the truth about it. Part of that truth is that chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad.In 2021, I published a book about how we remember slavery. I have spent years reading the first-person accounts of formerly enslaved people discussing the myriad horrors they endured—the journey across the Middle Passage, the abuse, the sexual violence, the psychological terror, the family separations. It is worth taking the time, in light of the president’s recent words, to revisit some of these accounts.[Adam Serwer: The new dark age]In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. His book was one of the first autobiographies ever published by a formerly enslaved person, and it laid the groundwork for a new genre of literature that would transform what people around the world understood about slavery. Equiano had been kidnapped from what is now Nigeria and marched for several months to the coast of West Africa. One of the most devastating scenes in his book describes the sadism of the Middle Passage:The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.The conditions were so bad, he writes, that some of the captives flung themselves overboard:One day, when we had a smooth sea, and a moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew.Once they arrived on American shores, men, women, and children were forced onto auction blocks where families were broken apart. Once separated, most would never see one another again.Henry Bibb, born enslaved in Kentucky, writes in his 1849 memoir:After the men were all sold they then sold the women and children. They ordered the first woman to lay down her child and mount the auction block; she refused to give up her little one and clung to it as long as she could, while the cruel lash was applied to her back for disobedience. She pleaded for mercy in the name of God. But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other. Finally the poor little child was torn from the mother while she was sacrificed to the highest bidder.When the captives arrived at the home or plantation of their enslaver, many of them were forced to work in sweltering fields with hardly any respite. Their days began early. Austin Steward, born enslaved in Virginia, writes in his 1857 book:It was the rule for the slaves to rise and be ready for their task by sun-rise, on the blowing of a horn or conch-shell; and woe be to the unfortunate, who was not in the field at the time appointed, which was in thirty minutes from the first sounding of the horn. I have heard the poor creatures beg as for their lives, of the inhuman overseer, to desist from his cruel punishment.On the plantation, enslaved people were denied any physical autonomy, and were subjected to torturous, and often arbitrary, violence at the hands of overseers and enslavers. As William Coleman, born in Tennessee around 1853, recalled as part of an interview for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s:I’se seen the slaves whipped for nothing, but then if they did do something to be whipped for they were almost killed before Maser would quit working on them … One time one of the slaves was helping Mistress there in the yard and he passed too close to her as he was hurrying fast as he could, and sort of bumped into her. She never paid him no attention, but Maser saw him and he let him go on ahead and finish what he was doing then he called that poor negro to him and took him out in the pasture, tied his hands together, throwed the other end of the rope over a limb on a tree and pulled that negro’s hands up in the air to where that negro had to stand on his tiptoes, and Maser he took all that negro’s clothes off and whipped him with that rawhide whip until that negro was plum bloody all over. Then he left that poor negro tied there all the rest of the day and night.Enslaved Black women were particularly vulnerable to insidious and unrelenting sexual violence at the hands of their enslavers. In his 1857 book, William Anderson, born enslaved in Virginia, describes this:My master often went to the house, got drunk, and then came out to the field to whip, cut, slash, curse, swear, beat and knock down several, for the smallest offense, or nothing at all.He divested a poor female slave of all wearing apparel, tied her down to stakes, and whipped her with a handsaw until he broke it over her naked body. In process of time he ravished her person and became the father of a child by her.The constant threat of such violence took an immense psychological toll on those who were subjected to it. Harriet Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, writes in her 1861 book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things … The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe … My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.The consequences of being caught in an attempted escape were so severe that most enslaved people never dared try. In Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, he describes watching what happened to an enslaved man who ran away and then was captured several weeks later:Wiley was stripped, and compelled to endure one of those inhuman floggings to which the poor slave is so often subjected. It was the first and last attempt of Wiley to run away. The long scars upon his back, which he will carry with him to the grave, perpetually remind him of the dangers of such a step.Even after slavery was formally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the pain the institution wrought on the country’s 4 million freedmen and freedwomen continued to reverberate. Throughout the late 19th century, newly emancipated Black people used newspapers to try to locate family members they had been separated from many years before. The Christian Recorder published this ad following the war in 1865:INFORMATION WANTEDOf my mother and father, Caroline and Issac Denna; also, my sisters, Fanny, Jane and Betsy Denna, and my brothers, Robert R., Hugh Henry, and Philander Denna. We were born in Fauquier Co, Va. In 1849 they were taken from the plantation of Josiah Lidbaugh, in said county, and carried to Winchester to be sold. About the same time I left my home in Clark Co, and have not heard from them since. The different ministers of Christian churches will do a favor by announcing the above, and any information will be gladly received by GEO. HENRY DENNA, Galva, Henry Co.For many, the search meant trying to find someone they hadn’t seen for decades. Nancy Jones published this ad in 1886, more than 30 years after she had last seen her son:INFORMATION WANTED of my son, Allen Jones. He left me before the war, in Mississippi. He wrote me a letter in 1853 in which letter he said that he was sold to the highest bidder, a gentleman in Charleston, S.C. Nancy Jones, his mother, would like to know the whereabouts of the above named person.Whether mother and son were ever reunited is unknown.None of us can imagine what it is like to be subjected to the unremitting physical, psychological, and social violence of chattel slavery. But museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture bring us closer to being able to do so by sharing first-person accounts of those who lived through that terrible violence. At these museums, we see the garments enslaved people wore, the tools they used, the structures in which they lived. We see their faces; we hear their voices.[Clint Smith: Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination’]The NMAAHC, in particular, is unflinching in its characterization of slavery as an unequivocally evil system, one whose impact continues to be felt across our society. In 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. Today, although they make up 14 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.Still, the museum also makes clear that the Black American experience is not singularly defined by slavery, but also by the art, literature, and cultural traditions that have emerged from, and in spite of, centuries of interpersonal and structural violence. These are not mutually exclusive, and the NMAAHC understands that Americans should learn about both.And yet the MAGA movement wants to tell a story about America that is disproportionately focused on what its proponents perceive to be the exceptionalism of this country. They are invested in this story because having to look too closely at the disturbing parts of American history would mean having to look closely at the disturbing parts of themselves. But instead of ignoring the shameful parts of our past, shouldn’t we—as individuals and as a country—want to learn from aspects of our history that we are not proud of? What other way is there to become the version of ourselves that we aspire to be?The Trump administration is, in both public discourse and public policy, arguably the most racist presidential administration in modern American history. Each week seems to bring a new example of its bigotry. I am sometimes tempted, upon encountering yet another instance of this omnipresent racial antagonism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet, we must write it down, if for nothing else, then for the sake of those who will come after us. I think of Frederick Douglass, who wrote about the monstrousness of slavery even when the idea of abolition seemed preposterous to most Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about how the nation must hold on to the values of Reconstruction long after federal soldiers marched out of the former Confederacy and abandoned Black southerners. Ida B. Wells wrote about the lynchings taking place throughout the South even as fresh bodies were still swinging from the trees. Their words were essential because they remind us that some Americans did bear witness to, and stand against, these atrocities.This is part of the reality of Black life in this country: We must make a record of those forces that seek to erase us and erase our histories so that future generations know we did not simply accept it. Our ancestors’ words remind us that we never have.