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.