In 1969, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, in Washington, D.C., debuted a new exhibit: “The Rat: Man’s Invited Affliction.” The display—complete with live rats—was different from what people were used to seeing from the venerable Smithsonian Institution. At the time, the main event at the Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) was an exhibit that focused on the fanfare of presidential campaigns and conventions. But Anacostia, which had opened two years prior, was a new kind of museum.It was well known that the poor neighborhoods of D.C.—the Black neighborhoods of D.C.—had some of the worst rat problems in the country. “The Rat” was a direct response to an ongoing crisis, which made it an unusual choice for a museum. Much of the exhibit was inspired by community voices, including by children who’d told museum staff about rat bites and about vermin so large, they were mistaken for stray cats. Wall text warned against the diseases rats carried, explained different ways to kill them, and advised residents to dispose of trash in tightly covered bins. Going beyond the typically neutral language found in Smithsonian museums, the exhibit charged the Department of Public Health as complicit in creating the scourge.Anacostia, since renamed the Anacostia Community Museum, was the first federally funded museum focused on Black history, as well as the first federally funded community museum; it is still the only Smithsonian to archive and document daily life in the nation’s capital. “The Rat” set the tone for how the smallest Smithsonian would exist in the shadow of its bigger siblings. Its exhibits and projects have emphasized the history of the community itself. For longtime Anacostia residents, the building has also become a sanctuary. The museum is home to a community garden and a library, and hosts yoga classes and youth programming. During the early years of the coronavirus pandemic, the museum kept a fridge stocked with meals, maintained by a local nonprofit.But the museum has also struggled to stay alive, and to keep its independent identity. The ACM has always had to fight for funding, space, and the attention of decision makers in the city and federal governments. This vulnerability reached its peak in 2025, when community members had to rally to save their museum from President Trump’s budget cuts. But the future of the smallest Smithsonian is still uncertain, and there is a real risk that Trump’s ongoing campaign against Black history might claim this unique institution.In the mid-1960s, Sidney Dillon Ripley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, imagined an addition to its holdings—a neighborhood outpost that might coax more Black D.C. residents to explore the Smithsonian museums downtown. Ripley did not designate a specific location, and multiple communities lobbied to host the new entity. In the end, concerted organizing efforts and enthusiasm in Anacostia—a historic, majority-Black enclave across the Anacostia River from the rest of D.C.—won out. But by the time the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum opened, in 1967, the place had become more than just a promotional outpost. It had repurposed the abandoned Carver Theater, once the only venue where Black residents east of the river could watch new movies. Staff and residents had brought their own ideas, shaping a space that would preserve the everyday miracles of Black life.The following year would be a defining time for the museum. In 1968, Anacostia was one of the hubs of the uprisings that transformed the city after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Black communities were staking their claim to power—in the streets, in legislation, in the Black Power movement, and in the proud assertion that Black is beautiful. D.C., as both the nation’s capital and a majority-Black city that had recently been administered by segregationists in Congress, was a symbolic center of this transformation. In 1973, just a few years after a member of Congress had sent D.C.’s first appointed Black mayor a truckload of watermelons instead of a budget, the city celebrated home rule and the entry of a cadre of Black activists into its politics.The Anacostia Neighborhood Museum responded to the moment by offering what was then a radical premise: that Black power flows from a collective past that needs to be preserved and exhibited. It safeguards stories such as that of Vivian Williams, an activist who in 1967 led a boycott of Safeway after discovering price hikes timed to benefit-check days.For six decades, Anacostia has been the only Smithsonian where residents are at once visitors, subjects of study, curators, and producers. “The community became the museum,” a former interim director, James Early, told me. It was the first Smithsonian dedicated to Black history, and the museum always wore the distinction proudly. In 1987, it relocated to a newly built structure and was renamed, simply, the Anacostia Museum. The new building’s brick facade was intended to mimic the pattern of kente cloth.In 1972, Louise Daniel Hutchinson, the museum’s director of research, established an ambitious oral-history project with Anacostia residents, which became the greater Smithsonian’s first such collection. Researchers fanned out into the community, conducting interviews while also collecting donated items of cultural significance. Along with recordings, researchers returned with family Bibles, good china, and valuable mementos, including a porcelain pin box given to a Black seamstress by First Lady Edith Wilson.Louise Daniel Hutchinson (left) and an unidentified staff member pose together outside the Center for Anacostia Studies, September 1976. (Ann E. Zelle / Getty)Oral history, now a common part of the Smithsonian’s arsenal, has since become something of a specialty at the Anacostia Community Museum, which was given its current name in 2006. The form requires expertise in interviewing, as well as subjects’ trust. “Every exhibit is this major archival and primary-research undertaking,” Dominique Hazzard, a former staff member at the museum and a second-generation Anacostia resident, told me. She was a curator of the 2021–22 exhibit “Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington,” for which Hazzard and others gathered more than 100 oral histories from community members and activists.Because of the museum’s work, its artifacts have been treated with the care and seriousness that they deserve, and are now an official part of the country’s record and story. They sit in the nation’s archives with its founding documents, with dinosaur bones, with the space shuttle.Still, foot traffic has always been low, and it’s been difficult to get the tourists who travel to the larger Smithsonians to come across the river. Until gentrification swept into the area, the neighborhood remained largely isolated from the rest of the city—although that force promised more amenities and connections, it also displaced Black residents. The ACM, which protects the memories of that community, is also itself facing the possibility of elimination.In January, I made the trip to Anacostia. I drove up Morris Road toward Fort Stanton, a Union Army Civil War outpost built on a hill above the river. Across from the decommissioned fort sits the building where the Anacostia Community Museum has resided for four decades.I walked into the reading room, put on a pair of earphones, opened my laptop, and began to watch the museum’s archival videos. The grainy footage flickered to life: It’s 1974. John Kinard, Anacostia’s founding director and the first Black director of any Smithsonian, fills the frame, a steady presence against rows of shelves stacked high with boxes of files. His voice, smooth and melodic, rises over the room: “The museum is you,” he tells the members of the Anacostia Historical Society. Kinard declares that if the people gathered before him remain dedicated to the idea that history is power, then the museum will stand as a “shining example of the continued strength and vitality of the people of Anacostia.”At the very moment of my visit, a debate about the future of Kinard’s project was raging across the river. All through the previous year, the Smithsonian Institution had been one of Trump’s most prominent targets in his war on “woke.” Much of the White House’s attention had gone to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the much larger and more well-known museum across town. In March 2025, the NMAAHC was mentioned in an executive order accusing the Smithsonian Institution of promoting “divisive, race-centered ideology,” and ordering a purge of “ideological indoctrination.” Later, the White House demanded a review of countless current and planned exhibits.Any hopes that tiny Anacostia might simply go unnoticed in this onslaught against Black history were dashed during the budgeting process for 2026. In its proposal, the White House called for the Smithsonian’s total budget to be slashed by 12 percent. Part of that decrease would come through zeroing out the Anacostia Community Museum—which represents just under 0.3 percent of the Smithsonian’s federal budget—and abandoning a plan to build the National Museum of the American Latino, which currently exists as a pop-up series of exhibits at the National Museum of American History.Perhaps owing to the obscurity of the ACM, its potential fate received less attention than the broadsides delivered against the NMAAHC. But it had defenders, in Congress and elsewhere. When the budget was first proposed, Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, stated in an email to The Washington Post that the museum was a “valuable community resource,” and told the paper she would work to keep the museum intact.In an attempt to salvage what it could, in its own budget justification to Congress that May, the Smithsonian proposed folding the museum into the NMAAHC, transferring its staff, archives, collections, and real estate. Smithsonian officials argued that the move “would streamline the workforce” and produce operational efficiencies, while saving as much as possible of the museum’s exhibits and expertise.But among the ACM’s supporters and former staff, this plan was met with resentment. Anacostia was not a satellite or subsidiary of the NMAAHC, and its importance to the community was much deeper than its collections. Under federal law, private donations could not be used to compensate federal employees, so the community was at risk of losing its cornerstone for what was—in the nonprofit world—a relatively achievable sum: $3 million, the museum’s annual budget.In August, a month after the appropriations package that could kill the ACM was officially introduced in Congress, Anacostia residents hosted a rally, hoping to raise awareness. Organized by Save Our Museum, a local committee hastily put together during the budget process, the rally kicked off at the ACM and wound its way to the riverfront. Along the mile route, demonstrators sang along to go-go music and chanted. Afterward, the crowd gathered to share what the museum meant to them—reminiscing about Kwanzaa programs, Juneteenth celebrations, and bringing their children to the institution in its early days.But even after a 43-day federal shutdown—the longest in history—there was no clear path forward. After the shutdown ended on November 12, 2025, a continuing resolution kept all Smithsonian funding alive temporarily, extending it through January 30 at prior-year levels. As I sifted through the archives during that last month of funding, I was keenly aware that I might not have many visits left.But then, the next week, unexpected news arrived. On January 23, just days before the funding cutoff, Norton’s office posted on Facebook that a new appropriations package for the Smithsonian included funding for the Anacostia Community Museum. The package would continue the museum’s existence for another year and would in fact be about $183,000 more than its previous fiscal-year budget. With Norton’s office at the fore, the museum’s defenders in Congress had managed to slip support for the museum into the bill that funded the Smithsonian. Still, that funding lasts only through the 2026 fiscal year, at which point the scramble might begin again.The truth is, neither America nor the Smithsonian ever quite knew what to do with the gem they have in Anacostia. Though often pigeonholed as a “Black” museum or a community center, the ACM essentially fills the role of the museum of the capital city, with exhibits featuring Chinatown and the diverse neighborhood coalition of Adams Morgan. The museum preserves works like those of Hien Vu, who helped launch the D.C. Safe Nail Salon Project in 2011 after recognizing that developmental delays among the children she tutored at the Vietnamese American Service Center were linked to toxins in their mothers’ workplaces.As is true of any good museum, the history presented at the Anacostia Community Museum is thorny and sometimes uncomfortable. But this is essential to the messy and unfinished business of building a nation. There is a particularly potent juxtaposition in the story of Anacostia residents’ struggle to receive full citizenship in the shadow of the nation’s capital, one that requires us to interrogate the halls of power. “If you close ACM, there is no longer a museum of the history of the city,” Hazzard, the former curator, said. But, under a government intent on forced forgetting, perhaps that is the ultimate point.