Slavery

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday vetoed legislation that would have allowed public and private colleges to provide preferential admissions to applicants directly descended from individuals who were enslaved in the United States before 1900.

The governor thanked the bill’s author for his commitment to addressing disparities and urged educational institutions to review and determine “how, when, and if this type of preference can be adopted.”

“This bill clarifies, to the extent permitted by federal law, that California public and private postsecondary educational institutions may consider providing a preference in admissions to an applicant who is a descendant of slavery,” Newsom wrote Monday in his veto. “These institutions already have the authority to determine whether to provide admissions preferences like this one, and accordingly, this bill is unnecessary.”

The legislation would not have required applicants to belong to any particular race or ethnicity — a crucial detail that proponents said distinguished it from affirmative action, which is banned at California colleges. Critics, however, argued the term “slave” was used as a proxy for race.

Legal experts told The Times last month the measure probably would have faced challenges in court if the governor signed it into law.

“The question with this sort of provision is does this count as on the basis of race?” said Ralph Richard Banks, professor at Stanford Law School and the founder and faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice. “A secondary issue is going to be whether, even if it is not formally about racial classification, was it really adopted to get around the no-racial-classification rule? The law prohibits indirect methods of doing something that would be prohibited if you were to do it directly.”

Race-based college admissions are banned by federal and state law.

Proposition 209, which California voters approved nearly three decades ago, amended the state Constitution to bar colleges from considering race, sex, national origin or ethnicity during admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 in effect ended race-conscious college admissions nationwide, ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard that such policies violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

California became the first state government in the country to study reparations, efforts to remedy the lingering effects of slavery and systemic racism, after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a national conversation on racial justice.

Newsom and state lawmakers passed a law to create a “first in the nation” task force to study and propose effective ways to help atone for the legacy of slavery. That panel spent years working on a 1,080-page report on the effects of slavery and the discriminatory policies sanctioned by the government after slavery was abolished, and the findings became the genesis for a slate of legislation proposed by the California Legislative Black Caucus.

Last week, Newsom signed Senate Bill 518, which will create a new office called the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. That bureau will create a process to determine whether someone is the descendant of a slave and to certify someone’s claim to help them access benefits.

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), who introduced Assembly Bill 7, said his legislation would have allowed colleges to grant preference to the descendants of enslaved people in order to rectify a “legacy of exclusion, of harm.”

Andrew Quinio, an attorney specializing in equality issues for the Pacific Legal Foundation, believes AB 7 was blatantly unconstitutional. The foundation is a conservative public interest law firm that seeks to prevent government overreach.

“This was a bill that was born out of the Reparations Task Force recommendations; it was part of the package of bills of the Road to Repair from the California Legislative Black Caucus so this has a very clear racial intent and racial purpose and it will have a racial effect,” he said. “[Legislation] doesn’t have to benefit the entirety or even the majority of a demographic in order for it to be unlawfully based on race.”

Lisa Holder, a civil rights attorney and president of the Equal Justice Society, a progressive nonprofit that works to protect policies that promote diversity, argued the measure’s framing made it highly likely to satisfy legal challenges.

“This (legislation) is very specifically tailored to correct the harms that we have seen, the harms from the past that continue into the present,” she said. “… Because this bill seeks to erase those harms by focusing specifically on the descendant community, it is strong enough to establish a compelling interest.”

Gary Orfield, a law and education professor and co-founder of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, agreed the legislation was carefully written in a way that could have withstood legal challenges. He pointed out California allows university programs that support Native American students because they were narrowly tailored to focus on tribal affiliation — which is considered a political classification — instead of race or ethnicity.

Orfield said applicants of various races could have potentially benefited from the new admissions policy, as many Native Americans were enslaved and Asiatic coolieism, or Asian indentured servitude, was declared a form of human slavery in the state constitution in 1879.

“All Black people weren’t slaves and all slaves were not Black,” he said. “I think there is a good argument to say that slavery isn’t defined strictly by race and is not just a proxy for race and there certainly is a legitimate concern when you are thinking about remediation for historic violations.”

Orfield, however, said convincing the public was a different matter.

“I don’t think all people will easily understand this,” he said. “Americans tend to think that discrimination doesn’t cross over multiple generations. But I think that it does — I think there has been a long-lasting effect.”

Staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.

Bettina Aptheker was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley when she climbed on top of a police car, barefoot so she wouldn’t damage it, and helped start the Free Speech Movement.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” she told a crowd gathered in Sproul Plaza on that October Thursday in 1964, quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

She was blinded by the lights of the television cameras, but the students roared back approval, and “their energy just sort of went through my whole body,” she told me.

Berkeley, as Aptheker describes it, was still caught in the tail end of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when the 1st Amendment was almost felled by fear of government reprisals. Days earlier, administrators had passed rules that cracked down on political speech on campus.

Aptheker and other students had planned a peaceful protest, only to have police roll up and arrest a graduate student named Jack Weinberg, a lanky guy with floppy hair and a mustache who had spent the summer working for the civil rights movement.

Well-versed in those non-violent methods that were finally winning a bit of equality for Black Americans, hundreds of students sat down around the cruiser, remaining there more than 30 hours — while hecklers threw eggs and cigarette butts and police massed at the periphery — before the protesters successfully negotiated with the university to restore free speech on campus.

History was made, and the Free Speech Movement born through the most American of traits — courage, passion and the invincibility of youth.

“You can’t imagine something like that happening today,” Aptheker said of their success. “It was a different time period, but it feels very similar to the kind of repression that’s going on now.”

Under the standards President Trump is pushing on the University of Southern California and eight other institutions, Aptheker would likely be arrested, using “lawful force if necessary,” as his 10-page “compact for academic excellence” requires. And the protest of the students would crushed by policies that would demand “civility” over freedom.

If you somehow missed his latest attack on higher education, the Trump administration sent this compact to USC and eight other institutions Thursday, asking them to acquiesce to a list of demands in return for the carrot of front-of-the-line access to federal grants and benefits.

While voluntary, the agreement threatens strongman-style, that institutions of higher education are “free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forgo federal benefits.”

That’s the stick, the loss of federal funding. UCLA, Berkeley and California’s other public universities can tell you what it feels like to get thumped with it.

“It’s intended to roll back any of the gains we’ve made,” Aptheker said of Trump’s policies. “No university should make any kind of deal with him.”

The greatest problem with this nefarious pact is that much of it sounds on the surface to be reasonable, if not desirable. My favorite part: A demand that the sky-high tuition of signatory universities be frozen for five years.

USC tuition currently comes in at close to $70,000 a year without housing. What normal parent thinks that sounds doable?

Even the parts about protests sound, on the surface, no big deal.

“Truth-seeking is a core function of institutions of higher education. Fulfilling this mission requires maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas where different views can be explored, debated, and challenged,” the document reads. “Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility.”

Civility like taking your shoes off before climbing on a police car, right?

As with all things Trump, though, the devil isn’t even in the details. It’s right there in black and white. The agreement requires civility, Trump style. That includes abolishing anything that could “delay or disrupt class instruction,” which is pretty much every protest, with or without footwear.

Any university that signs on also would be agreeing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

So no more talking bad about far-right ideas, folks. That’s belittling to our racists, misogynists, Christian nationalists and conservative snowflakes of all persuasions. Take, for example, the increasingly popular conservative idea that slavery was actually good for Black people, or at least not that bad.

Florida famously adopted educational standards in 2023 that argue slavery helped Black people learn useful skills. In another especially egregious example from the conservative educational nonprofit PragerU, a video for kids about Christoper Columbus has the explorer arguing, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”

And of course, Trump is busy purging the Smithsonian of any hints that slavery was a stain on our history.

Would it be violating Trump’s civility standards for a Black history professor to belittle such ideas as unserious and bonkers? What about debates in a feminism class that discuss Charlie Kirk’s comment that a good reason for women to go to college is to find a husband?

Or what about an environmental science class that teaches accurately that climate change denial is unscientific, and that it was at best anti-intellectual when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently referred to efforts to save the planet as “crap”? Would that be uncivil and belittling to conservatives?

Belittle is a tiny word with big reach. I worry that entire academic departments could be felled by it, and certainly professors of certain persuasions.

Aptheker, now 81, went on to become just the sort of professor Trump would likely loathe, teaching about freedom and inclusivity at UC Santa Cruz for decades. It was there that I first heard her lecture. I was a mixed-race kid who had been the target of more than one racial slur growing up, but I had never heard my personal experiences put into the larger context of being a person of color or a woman.

Listening to Aptheker and professors like her, I learned not only how to see my life within the broader fabric of society, but learned how collective action has improved conditions for the most vulnerable among us, decade after decade.

It is ultimately this knowledge that Trump wants to crush — that while power concedes nothing without a demand, collective demands work because they are a power of their own.

Even more than silencing students or smashing protests, Trump’s compact seeks to purge this truth, and those who hold it, from the system. Signing this so-called deal isn’t just a betrayal of students, it’s a betrayal of the mission of every university worth its tuition, and a betrayal of the values that uphold our democracy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has rightfully threatened to withhold state funding from any California university that signs, writing on social media that the Golden State “will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”

Of course, some universities will sign it willingly. University of Texas called it an “honor” to be asked. There will always be those who collaborate in their own demise.

But authoritarians live with the constant fear that people like Aptheker will teach a new generation their hard-won lessons, will open their minds to bold ideas and will question old realities that are not as unbreakable as they might appear. Universities, far from assuaging that constant fear, should fight to make it a reality.

Anything less belittles the very point of a university education.

SACRAMENTO — State lawmakers on Friday advanced a plan that would allow California colleges to offer preferential admission to students who are descended from enslaved people, part of an ongoing effort by Democrats to address the legacy of slavery in the United States.

The legislation, Assembly Bill 7, would allow — but not require — the University of California, Cal State and private colleges to give admissions preference to applicants who can prove they are directly related to someone who was enslaved in America before 1900.

If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the effort could put the Golden State on yet another collision course with the Trump administration, which has diversity initiatives and universities in its crosshairs.

“While we like to pretend access to institutions of higher learning is fair and merit-based and equal, we know that it is not,” said Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), who authored the bill, before the final vote Friday. “If you are the relative or the descendant of somebody who is rich or powerful or well connected, or an alumni of one of these illustrious institutions, you got priority consideration.”

But, Bryan said, “There’s a legacy that we don’t ever acknowledge in education … the legacy of exclusion, of harm.”

The bill is a top priority of the Legislative Black Caucus, which introduced 15 bills this year aimed at addressing the lingering effects of slavery and systemic racism in California.

Although California entered the Union as a “free state” in 1850, slavery continued in the Golden State after the state Constitution outlawed it in 1849. Slavery was abolished nationwide by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865 after the Civil War.

California voters barred colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity or national origin in admissions nearly three decades ago by passing Proposition 209. Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found that affirmative action in university admissions violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Bryan and other backers stressed that the language of the bill had been narrowly tailored to comply with Proposition 209 by focusing on lineage, rather than race. Being a descendant of a slave is not a proxy for race, they said, because not all enslaved people were Black, and not all Black Americans are descended from slaves.

“The story of our country is such that people who look like me and people who do not look like me could be descendants of American chattel slavery,” said Bryan, who is Black, during a July debate over the bill.

Supporters of the measure say that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his concurrence in the 2023 affirmative action case that refugees and formerly enslaved people who received benefits from the government after the Civil War were a “race-neutral category, not blacks writ large,” and that the term “freedman” was a “decidedly underinclusive proxy for race.”

Andrew Quinio, an attorney for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, told lawmakers during earlier debates on the bill that lineage is, in fact, a proxy for race because being a descendant of an American slave is “so closely intertwined” with being Black.

Instead, he said, the bill could give colleges a green light to give preference to “victims of racial discrimination in public education, regardless of race,” which would treat students as individuals, rather than relying on “stereotypes about their circumstances based on their race and ancestry.”

Were California “confident in the overlap of students who have experienced present discrimination and students who are descendants of slaves, then giving preference based on whether a student has experienced present discrimination would not exclude descendants of slaves,” he said.

Earlier this week, the Democratic-led Legislature also passed Senate Bill 518, which would create a new office called the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. That bureau would create a process to determine whether someone is the descendant of a slave and to certify someone’s claim to help them access benefits.

The legislature also approved Assembly Bill 57, by Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Hawthorne), which would help descendants of slavery build generational wealth by becoming homeowners.

The bill would set aside 10% of the loans from a popular program called California Dream for All, which offers first-time home buyers a loan worth up to 20% of the purchase price of a house or condo, capped at $150,000.

The loans don’t accrue interest or require monthly payments. Instead, when the mortgage is refinanced or the house is sold, the borrower pays back the original loan, plus 20% of its increase in value.

McKinnor said during debates over the bill that the legacy of slavery and racism has created stark disparities in home ownership rates, with descendants of slaves about 30 percentage points behind white households.

The Legislature also passed McKinnor’s AB 67, which sets up a process for people who said they or their families lost property to the government through “racially motivated eminent domain” to seek to have the property returned or to be paid.

Nonpartisan legislative analysts said that the bill could create costs “in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars,” depending on the number of claims submitted, the value of the properties and the associated legal costs.

California became the first state government in the country to study reparations after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a national conversation on racial justice.

Newsom and state lawmakers passed a law to create a “first in the nation” task force to study and propose remedies to help atone for the legacy of slavery. That panel spent years working on a 1,080-page report on the effects of slavery and the discriminatory policies sanctioned by the government after slavery was abolished.

The report recommended more than 100 policies to help address persistent racial disparities, including reforms to the criminal justice system and the housing market, the first of which were taken up last year by the Legislature’s Black Caucus.

Hamstrung by a budget deficit, lawmakers passed 10 of 14 bills in the reparations package last year, which reform advocates felt were lackluster.

How Californians feel about reparations depends on what is under discussion. A poll by the L.A. Times and the UC Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies in 2023 found that voters opposed the idea of cash reparations by a 2-to-1 margin, but had a more nuanced view on the lasting legacy of slavery and how the state should address those wrongs.

Most voters agreed that slavery still affects today’s Black residents, and more than half said California is either not doing enough, or just enough, to ensure a fair shake at success.

California banned slavery in its 1849 Constitution and entered the Union as a “free state” under the Compromise of 1850, but loopholes in the legal system allowed slavery and discrimination against formerly enslaved people to continue.

California passed a fugitive slave law — rare among free states — in 1852 that allowed slaveholders to use violence to capture enslaved people who had fled to the Golden State. Slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865, ratified after the end of the Civil War.

Census records show about 200 enslaved African descendants lived in California in that year, though at least one estimate from the era suggested that the population was closer to 1,500, according to the report drafted by the reparations task force.

Professor Kevin Waite had just finished a seminar on the run-up to the American Civil War on Friday morning when a student cautiously raised her hand.

“Can I ask about the Charlie Kirk situation?” she said in Waite’s classroom at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The student, he said, wondered whether recent events carried any echoes of the past. Hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflict and the horrific bloodshed of past centuries have previously been the stuff of doomsday prepper threads on Reddit, but this week’s shooting made it a mainstream topic of conversation.

While cautioning that the country is nowhere near as fractured as it was when the Civil War erupted, Waite and other scholars of the period say they do increasingly see parallels.

“Our current political moment is really resonating with the 1850s,” the historian said.

He and other scholars note similarities between the deployment of troops to American cities, widespread disillusionment with the Supreme Court, and spasms of political violence — especially from disaffected young men.

“What we call polarization, they called sectionalism, and in the 1850s there was a growing sense that the sections of the country were pulling apart,” said Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson University.

Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22-year-old who left antifascist messages, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence.”

Conservative influencers amplified the rhetoric, with Trump ally Laura Loomer posting on X, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

Violence was far more organized and widespread in the late 1850s, historians caution. Congressmen regularly pulled knives and pistols on one another. Mobs brawled in the streets over the Fugitive Slave Law. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his sons hacked five men to death with swords.

But some aspects of modern politics are worryingly similar, scholars said.

“What almost scares me more than the violence itself is the reaction to it,” Waite said. “It was paranoia, the perception that this violence was unstoppable, that really sent the nation spiraling toward Civil War in 1860 and ’61.”

Top of mind for Waite was the paramilitary political movement known as the Wide Awakes, hundreds of thousands of of torch-toting, black-capped abolitionist youths who took to the street out of frustration with their Republican representatives.

“There was this perception that antislavery Republicans hadn’t been sufficiently aggressive,” Waite said. Wide Awakes, he said, believed “that it was the slaveholders that were really pushing their agenda much more forcefully, much more violently, and antislavery [politicians] couldn’t just sit down and take it anymore.”

Most Democratic politicians of the era were fighting to expand slavery to the Western territories, extend federal power to claw back people who’d escaped it, and enshrine slaveholders rights to travel freely with those they held in bondage.

The Wide Awakes struck terror in their hearts.

“For their political opponents, it was a really scary spectacle,” Waite said. “Any time a cotton gin burned down in the South, they pointed to the Wide Awakes and other more radical antislavery Northerners and said, ‘This is arson.’”

For Waite, the Wide Awakes can be compared to an antebellum antifa, while the paramilitaries of the South were more like modern Proud Boys.

“The South was highly militarized,” he said. “Every adult white man was part of a local militia. It was like a social club, so it was easy to take these local militias and turn them into anti-abolitionist defense units.”

Still, incursions by abolitionists into the South were rare. Incursions by slave powers into the North were common, and routinely enforced by armed soldiers.

Legal scholars have already noted striking similarities between Trump’s use of the military to aid his mass deportation effort. The Trump administration has leaned on constitutional maneuvers used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — a divisive law that empowered slave catchers from the South to make arrests in Northern states — in legal arguments to justify the use of troops in immigration enforcement.

“I argue it was the fugitive crisis, more than the territorial crisis, that drove the coming of the Civil War,” Pinsker said. “The resistance in the North essentially made the Fugitive Slave Law dead-letter. They broke the enforcement of that law through legal, political and sometimes protest resistance.”

Many Northern states had passed “personal liberty laws” to prevent Black people from being snatched off the streets and returned to slavery in the South — a move Waite and others compare to sanctuary laws across the country today.

“The attempt to uphold these personal liberty laws and simultaneously the government’s attempts to take these Black fugitives led to violence, and to perceptions that the so-called slave-power was the aggressor,” Waite said.

By the late 1850s, Northerners were equally fed up with the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was seen as a rubber stamp for slaveholders’ goals.

“The Supreme Court in the 1850s was dominated by Southerners, mostly Southern Democrats, and they were pro-slavery,” said Michael J. Birkner of Gettysburg University. “I think the Dred Scott case and the court being on one side is absolutely a parallel with today.”

The Dred Scott decision, which ruled Black people ineligible for American citizenship, is widely taught in schools.

But far fewer Americans know about the Lemmon case, a New York legal battle that could have effectively legalized slavery in all 50 states had the Taney court heard it before the war broke out in 1861.

“Slaveholders were eager to get that case before Taney, because that would have nationalized slavery,” Waite said.

Despite the similarities, scholars say that there is nothing inevitable about armed conflict, and that the imperative now is to bring the political temperature down.

“Donald Trump has not been offering that message with the clarity it needs,” Pinsker said. “He says he’s a big fan of Lincoln, but now is the moment for him to remember what Lincoln stood for.”

When it comes to parallels with America’s deadliest conflict, “there’s only one lesson,” the historian said.

“We do not want another civil war,” Pinsker said. “That’s the only message that matters.”

1 of 3 | People wait to enter Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum along the National Mall in Washington, DC on Tuesday, August 12, 2025. Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced he is placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the District in order to assist in crime prevention. It is unknown when members will be deployed. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 19 (UPI) — President Donald Trump stepped up his criticisms of the Smithsonian on Tuesday, deriding the museums for its negative portrayal of slavery in American history.

Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform that he would direct his attorneys to “review” the Smithsonian in the same way his administration has sought to reshape colleges and universities. The post comes a week after the White House announced it was subjecting the influential museum consortium to an unprecedented examination of its materials, signaling it had become a focal point in Trump’s efforts to transform cultural institutions.

In his post, Trump wrote that museums all over the country are the “last remaining segment of ‘woke.'”

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump wrote.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., reacted with a post on X, writing that if “Trump thinks slavery wasn’t bad, he clearly needs to spend more time in a museum.”

Roughly 17 million people visited one of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums and galleries last year.

Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, who is the first African American to lead the institution and has held the position since 2019, has previously commented on the importance of acknowledging slavery’s impact on American history.

“I believe strongly that you cannot understand America without understanding slavery, that our notions of freedom, our notions of liberty are juxtaposed with our notions of enslavement,” he said in an interview on Face the Nation in 2021. “And so I think that it’s not about pointing blame, it’s not about remembering difficult moments just to hurt.”

Last week, three White House aides wrote to Bunch in a letter notifying him the museum would be subject to a review to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

The reshaping of the Smithsonian and its galleries and museums has been part the Trump administration’s goal to remove left-leaning ideology from the federal government and cultural institutions.

In March, Trump signed an executive order directing the Smithsonian to eliminate “divisive” and “anti-American ideology” from its museums, pointing to exhibits that “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

He also named himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, seemingly in opposition to its having hosted performances he disagreed with for promoting so-called woke ideology. The move prompted many performances and performers to cancel shows.

The US President says a review of the national museums will be similar to those he has ordered for universities.

United States President Donald Trump has said the nation’s Smithsonian museums only discuss “horrible” topics, including “how bad Slavery was”, as his administration continues a review into the institution’s exhibits for their “Americanism”.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, Trump said the Smithsonian is “OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is”, including “how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been”.

Elaborating on a review of several of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums and galleries ordered by the White House last week, Trump said he has instructed his lawyers “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”.

“This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE,” Trump added.

The Organisation of American Historians (OAH) has expressed “deep concern and dismay” at the White House’s “unprecedented” request to review the Smithsonian’s exhibits, adding that “no president has the legitimate authority to impose such a review”.

The Smithsonian receives most of its budget from Congress but is independent of the government in decision-making.

The OAH also said that “it is particularly distressing to see this effort of historical censorship and sanitising tied to the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding”.

The Trump administration said it ordered the review of museums in advance of next year’s milestone, which will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

It was not until decades later, on December 18, 1865, that the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution officially abolished chattel slavery nationwide, although exceptions continued.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was opened in 2016 with a ceremony led by then-President Barack Obama, is one of the museums the White House has included in its review.

According to the museum’s website, visitors learn about the “richness and diversity of the African American experience” with exhibits ranging from a plantation cabin from South Carolina to Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac convertible.

The freedom of expression organisation PEN America has also expressed alarm at the Trump administration’s “sweeping review” of Smithsonian exhibits.

“The administration’s efforts to rewrite history are a betrayal of our democratic traditions and a deeply concerning effort to strip truth from the institutions that tell our national story,” Hadar Harris, the managing director of PEN America’s Washington, DC, office, said in a statement.

Trump has made threats to cut federal funding for top US educational institutions, citing pro-Palestinian protests against US ally Israel’s war on Gaza, transgender policies, climate initiatives and diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.

Last month, the government settled probes into Columbia University, which agreed to pay $221m, and Brown University, which said it would pay $50m to the government. Both institutions also accepted certain government demands, including how some topics are taught.

Harvard University has sued the Trump administration to halt the freezing of $2.3bn of its federal funding.

Pete Hegseth, widely considered the least qualified Defense secretary in American history, is hardly anyone’s version of the ideal Christian husband and father.

Only 45 years old, he’s been married three times.

His first marriage — to his high school sweetheart — lasted a mere four years, deteriorating after Hegseth admitted to multiple extramarital affairs.

A couple of years later, he married his second wife, with whom he had three children. During that marriage, he fathered a child with a Fox News producer who eventually became his third wife.

He paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault (he denies the assault). He routinely passed out drunk at family gatherings and misbehaved in public when inebriated, according to numerous witnesses. His own mother once accused him of being “an abuser of women,” though she later retracted her claims when Hegseth was facing Senate confirmation.

Still, the Senate’s Republican majority, cowed by President Trump, confirmed his appointment. Hegseth has two qualities that Trump prizes above all others. He is blindly loyal to the president, and he looks good on TV.

After his installation, Hegseth proceeded to fire top military brass who happened to be Black or women or both. He has restored the names of Confederate generals to Army bases (Bragg and Benning). His petty “anti-woke” crusade led him to strip the name of the assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk, a former Naval officer who served honorably, from a Navy ship. And he has considered doing the same to a ship named in honor of the abolitionist and Civil War hero Harriet Tubman. He has said that women do not belong in combat roles, and has kicked out transgender soldiers, cruelly stripping them of the pensions they earned for their service.

In March, he shared classified information about an impending American airstrike in Yemen on an unsecured Signal group chat that included his wife, on purpose, and the editor of the Atlantic, by accident.

He is, in short, the least serious man ever to lead this nation’s armed forces.

As if all that weren’t dispiriting enough, Hegseth is now in bed (metaphorically) with a crusading Christian nationalist.

Earlier this month, Hegseth made waves when he reposted on social media a CNN interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor and theocrat who is working hard to turn the clock back on the rights of every American who is not white, Christian and male.

In the interview, Wilson expounded on his patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian and homophobic views.

Women, he said, should serve as “chief executive of the home” and should not have the right to vote. (Their men can do that for them.) Gay marriage and gay sex should be outlawed once again. “We know that sodomy is worse than slavery by how God responds to it,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown. (Slavery is “unbiblical,” he avowed, though he did bizarrely defend it once, writing in 1990 a pamphlet that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.”)

When a new outpost of his church opened in Washington, D.C ., in July, Hegseth and his family were among the worshippers. CNN described Hegseth’s presence as “a major achievement” for Wilson.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth as he endorsed and reposted the interview. That is the motto of Wilson’s expanding universe, which includes his Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the center of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of more than 100 churches on four continents, parochial schools, a college, a publishing house and media platforms. “All of Christ for All of Life” is a shorthand for the belief that Christian doctrines should shape every part of life — including government, culture and education.

Wilson is a prolific author of books with titles such as “Her Hand in Marriage,” “Federal Husband,” and “Reforming Marriage.” His book “Fidelity” teaches “what it means to be a one-woman man.” Doubtful it has crossed Hegseth’s desk.

“God hates divorce,” writes Wilson in one of his books.

Given the way sexual pleasure is celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, Wilson has a peculiarly dim view of sex. I mean, how many weddings have been graced with recitations from the Song of Solomon, with its thinly disguised allusions to pleasurable sexual intimacy? (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.”)

Wilson’s world is considerably less sensual.

“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” he writes in “Fidelity.” “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Mutual sexual pleasure seems out of the question: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.” Ugh.

There is nothing particularly new here; Wilson’s ideology is just another version of patriarchal figures using religion to fight back against the equality movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They are basically the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church dressed up in respectable clothing.

“Some people may conflate Christian nationalism and Christianity because they both use the symbols and language of Christianity, such as a Bible, a cross and worship songs,” says the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism on its website. “But Christian nationalism uses the veneer of Christianity to advance its own aims — to point to a political figure, party or ideology instead of Jesus.”

What you have in people like Hegseth and Wilson are authoritarian men who hide behind their religion to execute the most unchristian of agendas.

God may hate divorce, but from my reading of the Bible, God hates hypocrisy even more.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian

Believe it or not, France has had a form of social security since the 1600s, and its modern system began in earnest in 1910, when the world’s life expectancy was just 32 years old. Today the average human makes it to 75 and for the French, it’s 83, among the highest in Europe.

Great news for French people, bad news for their pensions.

Because people are living longer, the math to fund pensions in France is no longer mathing, and now the country’s debt is nearly 114% of its GDP. Remember it was just a couple of years ago when protesters set parts of Paris on fire because President Emmanuel Macron proposed raising the age of legal retirement from 62 to 64. Well, now Prime Minister Francois Bayrou has proposed eliminating two national holidays, in an attempt to address the country’s debt.

In 2023, before Paris was burning, roughly 50,000 people in Denmark gathered outside of Parliament to express their anger over ditching one of the country’s national holidays. The roots of Great Prayer Day date all the way back to the 1600s. Eliminating it — with the hopes of increasing production and tax revenue — brought together the unions, opposing political parties and churches in a rare trifecta. That explains why a number of schools and businesses closed for the holiday in 2024 in defiance of the official change.

This week, Bayrou proposed eliminating France’s Easter Monday and Victory Day holidays, the latter marking the defeat of Nazi Germany. In a Reuters poll, 70% of respondents didn’t like the idea, so we’ll see if Paris starts burning again. Or maybe citizens will take a cue from the Danes and just not work on those days, even if the government decides to continue business as usual.

Here at home, President Trump has also floated the idea of eliminating one of the national holidays. However, because he floated the idea on Juneteenth — via a social media post about “too many non-working holidays” — I’m going to assume tax revenue wasn’t the sole motivation for his comments that day. You know, given his crusade against corporate and government diversity efforts; his refusal to apologize for calling for the death penalty for five innocent boys of color; and his approval of Alligator Alcatraz. However, while I find myself at odds with the president’s 2025 remarks about the holiday, I do agree with what he said about Juneteenth when he was president in 2020: “It’s actually an important event, an important time.”

Indeed.

While the institution of slavery enabled this country to quickly become a global power, studies show the largest economic gains in the history of the country came from slavery’s ending — otherwise known as Juneteenth. Two economists have found that the economic payoff from freeing enslaved people was “bigger than the introduction of railroads, by some estimates, and worth 7 to 60 years of technological innovation in the latter half of the 19th century,” according to the University of Chicago. Why? Because the final calculations revealed the cost to enslave people for centuries was far greater than the economic benefit of their freedom.

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus “discovered America,” civilizations had been thriving on this land for millennia. The colonizers introduced slavery to these shores two years before the first “Thanksgiving” in 1621. That was more than 50 years before King Louis XIV started France’s first pension; 60 years before King Christian V approved Great Prayer Day; and 157 years before the 13 colonies declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776.

Of all the national holidays around the Western world, it would appear Juneteenth is among the most significant historically. Yet it gained federal recognition just four years ago, and it remains vulnerable. The transatlantic slave trade transformed the global economy, but the numbers show it was Juneteenth that lifted America to the top. Which tells you the president’s hint at its elimination has little to do with our greatness and everything to do with the worldview of an elected official who was endorsed by the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan.

If it does get to the point where we — like France and Denmark — end up seriously considering cutting a holiday, my vote is for Thanksgiving. The retail industry treats it like a speed bump between Halloween and Christmas, and when history retells its origins, it’s not a holiday worth protesting to keep.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

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United States President Donald Trump has drawn mockery after he complimented the president of Liberia for speaking English “beautifully”, even though it is the country’s official language.

“Such good English, where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” Trump asked Joseph Boakai during a meeting with five African leaders at the White House on Wednesday.

“In Liberia?” Trump asked. Boakai seemed to chuckle before responding: “Yes sir.”

Alex Vines, head of the Africa Programme at the London think tank, Chatham House, told Al Jazeera: “President Trump’s limited knowledge of Africa was on show with his comment on President Boakai’s quality of English.”

Liberia was founded in 1822 as a colony for freed Black American slaves as white Americans sought to address what they saw as a problem – the presence of Black people in the United States once slavery ended.

Here is a potted history of the African nation:

Where is Liberia and how populous is it?

The country of five million people is located on the Western African coast and is bounded by Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea to the north, Ivory Coast to the east and the Atlantic Ocean to the south and west.

Liberia was founded in 1822 and became a republic in 1847. It is now Africa’s oldest republic and is seen by many as a symbol of African self-determination. Along with Ethiopia, it is the only African nation that was never colonised during Europe’s scramble for the continent.

There are officially 16 ethnic groups that make up Liberia’s Indigenous African population, with the largest being the Kpelle.

How, why and when was Liberia founded?

As the abolitionist movement against slavery gained ground in the US in 1822, a group of 86 formerly enslaved people arrived in Liberia’s present-day capital, Monrovia, the country’s largest port.

Jehudi Ashmun, a white American, was leading efforts by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to resettle free people of colour in Africa. While some chose to emigrate willingly, the organisation is known to have pressured or coerced others into relocating.

ACS was established by white Americans who believed that the presence of free Blacks in America posed a threat to the nation, as they might incite those who remained in slavery to rebel. Some also believed in the “inferiority” of Black people and thought them unable to achieve equality in American society. The organisation’s goal was, therefore, to establish a colony in West Africa that would take them in.

Liberia was proclaimed an independent republic in 1847, becoming the first African republic to achieve such status and be recognised by Western nations. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, an African American who had emigrated to Liberia in 1829 and become a politician, was elected the first president of the new country.

While Indigenous leaders resisted American attempts to purchase land, the newborn country was created after a US Navy officer coerced a local ruler to sell a strip of land to ACS. Its capital was named Monrovia after the US’s fifth president, James Monroe, who had procured government money for the project.

It is estimated that, in total, about 12,000 formerly enslaved Black Americans immigrated to Liberia between 1820 and 1861.

Who makes up the population?

African Americans and their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, dominated the government of Liberia thanks to their ties with the US government, through which they were able to conduct trade, until a military coup ended their influence in 1980.

Despite being a minority of about 5 percent of the total population in Liberia, from the start of the republic, they mostly excluded the Indigenous African population from any meaningful participation in the political life of the country.

Indigenous people who had migrated from western Sudan in the late Middle Ages constitute a majority of the population. A smaller portion also migrated from neighbouring western African states during the anti-slave-trade campaign and European colonial rule in the 1800s.

In more recent years, it has opened its doors to refugees from neighbouring countries, especially from the Ivory Coast, where civil war broke out in 2002 and 2011.

What is the official language of Liberia?

English is Liberia’s official language, though more than two dozen Indigenous languages are spoken there as well.

Americo-Liberians, who dominated political power until the military coup in 1980, imposed English as the commonly spoken language when they founded the republic in 1847.

Other languages spoken by Liberia’s Indigenous ethnic groups fall under three main groups, all belonging to the Niger-Congo language family: the Mande, Kwa and Mel languages.

What caused the civil wars in Liberia?

Liberia has endured two major civil wars in more recent decades. The country’s conflicts were deeply rooted in ethnic divisions.

Samuel Doe, a member of the Indigenous Krahn ethnic group, led a military coup in 1980, which overthrew the Americo-Liberian government and put an end to its political dominance marked by ethnic inequalities. Liberian President William R Tolbert was assassinated during the coup.

However, Doe ushered in a period of authoritarianism and human rights abuses that led to the First and Second Liberian Civil Wars.

The first war erupted in 1989, when Charles Taylor, a descendant of freed American slaves, launched an armed rebellion against Doe, which killed more than 200,000 people and displaced millions.

A second war broke out in 1999 when a rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), began a military offensive to topple Taylor’s government with the support of neighbouring Guinea.

The conflict spilled over into Guinea and Sierra Leone but subsided in 2003 with the intervention of international peacekeeping forces and Taylor’s resignation and exile.

Taylor was accused of human rights violations and indicted by a United Nations-sponsored war-crimes tribunal in 2003. He received a sentence of 50 years in prison.

What is the situation now?

Liberia has mostly experienced political stability since the second civil war ended. It held democratic elections in 2017, marking the first peaceful transfer of power since 1944.

Boakai was elected president in 2023 with 50.64 percent of the vote for a six-year term, defeating former international football star George Weah.

Vines, from Chatham House, said: “Ethnicity is less important in Liberia today and Americo-Liberians are a lot less dominant.”

“Liberians still perceive close ties with the US,” especially because of deep connections with many Green Card holders, Vines said, but the significant cut of USAID funding to the African continent earlier this year came as a shock.

During Wednesday’s White House meeting with Trump, Boakai described Liberia as “a longtime friend of the United States”.

“We believe in your policy of making America great again,” he told Trump at the meeting before advocating for US investment in his country. “We just want to thank you so much for this opportunity.”

Why did Trump meet the leaders of Liberia and other West African nations?

The five countries whose leaders met Trump – namely Liberia, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Senegal – possess untapped natural resources, including rare earth minerals. The US president saluted them as “very vibrant places with very valuable land, great minerals, great oil deposits and wonderful people”.

Vines said Boakai’s presence at the White House was “opportunistic”, as the Liberian president was already on a trip to the US, rather than a reflection of deep historical ties between the two nations.

Africa has become a battleground for global influence in the US-China geopolitical rivalry, but Trump is known for his apparently dismissive remarks about the continent.

During his first term as president, Trump caused outrage after criticising immigration to his country from El Salvador, Haiti and the African continent, which he reportedly dubbed “s***hole countries”.

The current Trump administration is also known to be seeking to deport people who have outstayed their visas or are otherwise in the US illegally to West African countries willing to receive them.

According to some media reports, a plan was presented at Wednesday’s meeting, but it remains unclear what Trump offered in exchange and whether any leaders were willing to accept his offer.

WASHINGTON — President Trump honored Juneteenth in each of his first four years as president, even before it became a federal holiday. He even claimed once to have made it “famous.”

But on this year’s Juneteenth holiday on Thursday, the usually talkative president kept silent about a day important to Black Americans for marking the end of slavery in the country he leads again.

No words about it from his lips, on paper or through his social media site.

Asked whether Trump would commemorate Juneteenth in any way, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “I’m not tracking his signature on a proclamation today. I know this is a federal holiday. I want to thank all of you for showing up to work. We are certainly here. We’re working 24/7 right now.”

Asked in a follow-up question whether Trump might recognize the occasion another way or on another day, Leavitt said, “I just answered that question for you.”

Trump’s silence was a sharp contrast from his prior acknowledgment of the holiday. Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States by commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas. Their freedom came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves in the Confederacy by signing the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.

Trump’s quiet on the issue also deviated from White House guidance that Trump planned to sign a Juneteenth proclamation. Leavitt didn’t explain the change. Trump held no public events Thursday, but he shared statements about Iran, the TikTok app and Fed chairman Jerome Powell on his social media site.

He had more to say about Juneteenth in yearly statements in his first term.

In 2017, Trump invoked the “soulful festivities and emotional rejoicing” that swept through the Galveston crowd when a major general delivered the news that all enslaved people were free.

He told the Galveston story in each of the next three years. “Together, we honor the unbreakable spirit and countless contributions of generations of African Americans to the story of American greatness,” he added in his 2018 statement.

In 2019: “Across our country, the contributions of African Americans continue to enrich every facet of American life.”

In 2020: “June reminds us of both the unimaginable injustice of slavery and the incomparable joy that must have attended emancipation. It is both a remembrance of a blight on our history and a celebration of our Nation’s unsurpassed ability to triumph over darkness.”

In 2020, after suspending his campaign rallies because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump chose Tulsa, Okla., as the place to resume his public gatherings, and scheduled a rally for June 19. But the decision met with such fierce criticism that Trump postponed the event by a day.

Black leaders had said it was offensive for Trump to choose June 19 and Tulsa for a campaign event, given the significance of Juneteenth and Tulsa being the place where, in 1921, a white mob looted and burned that city’s Greenwood district, an economically thriving area referred to as Black Wall Street. As many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands were temporarily held in internment camps overseen by the National Guard.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal days before the rally, Trump tried to put a positive spin on the situation by claiming that he had made Juneteenth “famous.” He said he changed the rally date out of respect for two African American friends and supporters.

“I did something good. I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump said. “It’s actually an important event, it’s an important time. But nobody had heard of it. Very few people have heard of it.”

Generations of Black Americans celebrated Juneteenth long before it became a federal holiday in 2021 with the stroke of former President Joe Biden’s pen.

Later in 2020, Trump sought to woo Black voters with a series of campaign promises, including establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

He lost the election, and that made it possible for Biden to sign the legislation establishing Juneteenth as the newest federal holiday.

Last year, Biden spoke briefly at a holiday concert on the South Lawn that featured performances by Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. Former Vice President Kamala Harris danced onstage with gospel singer Kirk Franklin.

Biden was spending this year’s holiday in Galveston, Texas, where he was set to speak at a historic African Methodist Episcopal church.

Superville writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Calvin Woodward contributed to this report.