NY Underground Railroad Museum Sues Trump Administration Over Grant Cancellation
The Trump administration is facing yet another lawsuit, accusing it of efforts to remove or defund Black history. Because when this (alleged) white nationalist regime isn’t purging Black history exhibits from national parks and federally-controlled museums, it’s pulling grant money from institutions that promote what it’s trying so hard to whitewash or flat-out hide from the world.
In fact, the Trump administration once tried to sanitize the story of the Underground Railroad on the National Park Service webpage, describing it as an example of “Black/White Cooperation” in the Abolition movement, and removing Harriet Tubman from the site altogether, before it was shamed into restoring Tubman’s story, while keeping the skewed, white fragility-friendly narrative around the larger movement.
So, it should surprise absolutely no one that an Underground Railroad museum in upstate New York is now suing the administration, claiming it unlawfully terminated its federal grant on the basis of race, pointing to President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle DEI and his administration’s proven record of labeling Black history as such just because it’s Black history.
From NBC News:
The Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York, alleges that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ cancelation of a $250,000 grant amounted to viewpoint and racial discrimination, violating the First and Fifth Amendments, respectively.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, calls for the funds to be reinstated.
The suit cited Trump’s January 2025 executive order that required federal agencies to eliminate any operations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within 60 days. The 40-page brief outlined 1,400 grants that were terminated in early April 2025 “for their conflict with President Trump’s EOs and the new agency priorities adopted in their wake.”
Nina Loewenstein, a lawyer for the museum, told NBC News that there is “just no legitimate basis” for the grant’s cancellation, adding that it is “just explicitly erasing things associated with the Black race.”
“Numerous statements of the current Executive Branch leadership reflect overt and coded racism supporting white supremacy and denigrating Black history in America,” the lawsuit states, adding that the administration “systematically targeted grantees and programs that sought to increase the public’s understanding of Black history and cultures.”
No matter how this lawsuit shakes out, no lie was told in that statement.
In February, a judge ruled in favor of plaintiffs who sued the Trump administration, seeking the restoration of an exhibit at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, honoring the enslaved people who were owned by President George Washington, which the administration began removing in compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive order, the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” act. Around the same time — which was during Black History Month, by the way — Trump directed the National Park Service to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi. Before that, his administration directed the department to remove exhibits such as the iconic portrait of a runaway slave’s severely whipped back, titled “The Scourged Back,” from several other national parks.
Meanwhile, Trump and his administration full of barely-closeted white supremacists have worked to restore all honors, fort names, and monuments to the Confederacy and implement a right-wing curriculum that whitewashes American history to omit, spin or egregiously downplay anti-Black oppression.
Maya Angelou once famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Well, this administration of raging white nationalists shows us exactly what it is every single day. And we believe them just fine, which is why we have to fight back!
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