july/august 2026 Edition
These Are Not Ordinary Times
An unwillingness to be honest about our nation’s past has led to a number of national policies and major court decisions that are negatively impacting millions of American citizens. Multiple voices are pointing to our inability to acknowledge the role race has and still plays in this nation as central to a significant deterioration of civil and political rights.
“This country has never created a relationship to our history of racial violence, of enslavement, of lynching, of the abuse of “other people” who are disfavored, according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Founder Bryan Stevenson.
When a focus group leader asked a Warehouse Manager from North Carolina how he felt about the direction of the country, the 70 year old described a society under attack, especially for Black Americans.
“They are wiping out history. They’re changing voting rights. They’re wiping out districts where Blacks were. So we can still vote, but we have no representatives from those districts. I’m really worried about the status of Black Americans right now in the United States.”
On the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, white men wearing masks and sun glasses, carrying the flags of traitors alongside upsidedown distressed United States Flags, marched with the precision of a militia across Capital Hill shouting, “Life, Liberty, Victory. Reclaim America.” The America the nativist Patriot Front hopes to usher in would take us back to a past where Black, Brown and Indigenous Americans were treated as inferiors and refused equal opportunities.
Their leader delivered a short speech focused on his belief that America belongs to white men who can prove their heritage and who are being “replaced” by immigrant invaders. The enemies he listed during his remarks included, Black, Jewish, Latino, and LGBTQ+ people.
The Patriot Front was among the white supremacist groups that participated in the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville - a night of terror that included neo-fascists, alt-right, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, militia members and the Klan - and ended the following day with the death of a young white woman who peacefully disagreed with them.
Members of the Patriot Front took the metro to and from the July 4th demonstration. A photographer caught an image of them on the train, surrounding a lone Black woman sitting very still and appearing distraught.
The picture is a “visual representation of how it feels to live alongside racism in essence - even when minding your business, even during the nation’s semiquincentennial,” wrote Theodore R. Johnson, a retired naval officer and author of “If We Are Brave.”
Princeton Scholar and Author Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. says Americans have entered a moment of profound crisis- they have no sense of common purpose and have lost sight of public good, and, he says, “race shadows it all.”
According to Glaude, the “panic and terror” portions of white America feel are due to changes in demographics and have led to the propagation of misleading concepts, such as the Great Replacement Theory, that over time has been normalized by Fox News, enough so that marchers, although masked, eagerly shout in the streets of the Nation’s Capital.
“We find ourselves living among men and women, once again, mad with the fever of a distorted view of liberty and willing to throw away this entire experiment in democracy as they cling to their racial fantasies,” Glaude has written. He is in agreement with the warehouse worker from North Carolina saying there is an”all out assault” on voting rights, affirmative action, and “bitter debates about American history.”
The mainstreaming of anti-Black, anti-immigrant, antisemite, anti-LGBTQ messages and a failure to be honest about history has had a damning impact on party politics.
Tim Miller, a former republican political consultant, told documentarians he has been shocked to see such a level of fear and grievance infect politics. “There have always been hate movements, but a major political party adopting it as truth hasn’t happened in our lifetime.”
Since the Declaration was penned, women, Black and Native Americans and many immigrant ethnic groups have had to live in the space between the letter of the law and its spirit. Even when the rights of citizens were eventually established in law, after the Civil War for Black men, the early 20th Century for white women and reestablished for people of color (women too this time) in the 1960s, the law was, and continues to be, subject to reinterpretation. History has shown that those who do not want a government “of all the people, by all the people and for all the people,” as Theologian Theodore Parker first said on May 29, 1850, and President Lincoln adapted in 1863 at Gettysburg, have and will use the threat of extra-legal violence to gain and maintain power.
It happened as recently as Jan. 6, 2021 and part of the reason, says EJI’s Stevenson, is that we continue to engage with a false narrative about this nation’s past.
“We have never created a relationship to that history that has motivated us to say, never again,” he said.
In an interview with Commentator Ezra Klein, Stevenson went on to explain the United States has over 40 Holocaust Museums that each take visitors on a narrative journey through human rights violations, at the end of which, most people want to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.
Because we haven’t done that with slavery, lynching, disenfranchisement, the restriction of daily freedoms of Black people, economic oppression, segregation, state and city sanctioned violence, and centuries of criminalization, “we keep being romanced by new manifestations that pull us into the very patterns and behaviors that allow that violence to be replicated,” he said. But, he added, acknowledgement will help us create a new world, one where, “mobs don’t form when our political candidate doesn’t win and engage in violent protests.”
There has been an “ongoing fury” from President Donald Trump and his White House going back to his first term against exploring this part of our past, Klein said. The President seems to believe, “that people like you, trying to create a relationship to our racial history, trying to create a reckoning with it, are trying to take the story of America and poison it.”
The Latest in the Battle for History
The same day the Patriot Front asserted their “ideals” on July 4, 2026, the White House Domestic Policy Council released, “Saving America’s Story,” a 162-page report that concludes “the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”
Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III, is the first Black American to serve as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and in another first, the National Museum of American History is being run by a woman, Dr. Anthea Hartig. Both are under attack.
Dr. Bunch defended the work of the museum in a memo to staff, saying “this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History.”
Major news outlets summarily dismissed the White House accusations as vitriolic and mental while Fox News took another tact.
The nation’s largest group of U.S. history scholars, the Organization of American Historians [OAH], quickly came to the Smithsonian’s defense, calling the report’s “findings” fundamentally inaccurate, misleading and clearly ideological.
“Saving America’s Story” is a “broad attempt to return the nation to a vision of America that never actually existed and that serves the ends of superficial patriotism,” OAH wrote and accused the Executive Branch of overreach, coercion and politicization. The Trump administration is engaged in a “multi-pronged assault… against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life,” they stated.
The first time historians found themselves in the crosshairs of politicians, media and heritage organizations was at the start of the 20th century when PhD programs began producing professional historians. Before that, history was the product of good writers who idealized the nation’s founding. When scholars offered a less simplistic story to the Nation, complicating the narrative Americans had come to love, especially about the Revolution, criticism was swift and loud.
“Critics decried how the historian-authors questioned the motives of revolutionary leaders as well as their claims against British tyranny. The attacks resonated with much of the public in the wake of the emphasis of ‘100 percent Americanism’ during World War I and the post war ‘Red Scare,’” wrote Historian and Author Dr. Bruce W. Dearstyne. The story of loyalist Americans, Native and Black Americans faded from the pages of school books.
Philip Kennicott, a long-time art and culture critic for the Washington Post, had much to say about the report, and none of it was good. The unnamed authors scraped the bottom of the Internet in an attempt to show that the National Museum of History had been captured by ideologues and was erasing the nation’s heritage, cherry picking quotes, using them out of context, and basing their findings on a few “minor” sources.
“And at every turn it [the report] proves the opposite,” wrote Kennicott, “while scrubbing American history of everything that doesn’t fit officials’ feel good narrative of a country only incidentally marred by imperfections, all of which are safely in our past.”
He gave the report a failing grade, “just follow the footnotes, and you quickly realize this is a relentlessly tendentious piece of trash.” Later he added, at times the report would be laughable “if it weren’t so dangerous to the Smithsonian’s independence.”
Saving America’s Story is the first in a series of content audits the Trump Administration plans to perform on the Institutes’ 21 museums, National Zoo and 14 research and education centers. They announced their intentions last August, which stemmed from the President’s March 27, 2025 sweeping Executive Order [EO], Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. In an additional, unprecedented move, the EO directed Vice President JD Vance to join the Smithsonian Board of Regents, which includes U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Republican and Democratic Congressmen, as well as nine citizens. His task? Root out “divisive” and “ideological” narratives.
In June 2025, the President and Vance called for the firing of the Director of the Portrait Gallery on ideological grounds. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of a book on the inner workings of the Administration, revealed that the President was unhappy with his portrait as well as the accompanying text which mentioned he had been twice impeached. In response, the Regents reiterated that hiring and firing decisions belong solely to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, but the Director of the Gallery, Kim Sajet, still resigned to avoid becoming a distraction from the work of the museum.
Congress designed the Institute to be protected from politics. The President does not have the power to assert control over the staff, collection, donors, content, or any aspect of the Smithsonian.
OAH has expressed grave concern that the Administration's involvement is going to interfere with a “full and honest telling” of U.S. history, replacing it with a history “according to a single political party’s line.” Even more worrisome to OAH is their belief that any history approved by the Administration will “undoubtedly be in the service of authoritarian control over the national narrative, collective memory, and national collections.”
If that all seems a bit over the top, Kennicott raised the same misgivings reminding readers of an old Soviet saying, “The future is certain, it is the past that keeps changing.”
Conservative media regurgitated many of the misleading accounts listed in the report without giving the Institution or even the Republicans on its governing board an opportunity to comment.
Broadcaster Laura Ingraham listed each member by name and asked “Do they even know what the museum is being used for?” She described the Institution as a hot bed of socialism, transrights and anti-ICE messaging and called for Congress to pull its funding. In the end, the unethical practices of Ingraham and Fox News will likely turn their viewers against not just the Smithsonian, but against an accurate, truthful account of this nation’s past.
The way we share our history has been contentious for a long time. In 1926, the Grande Dame of literary reviews, The North American Review, featured an essay by Hiram Wesley Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, entitled, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” In it Evans complained that, "We can’t teach our kids what we want,” and ‘These folks are diluting America,’ according to Princeton’s Glaude.
In response, the Review ran “The Shape of Fear,”an essay by W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he wrote that the KKK’s power relied on lies.
“And here we are in 2026, in the 250th year, drowning in lies,” Glaude said.
Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum in Alabama is dedicated to showing visitors the unvarnished truth about the Black experience in America. It took visits to other countries, especially Germany, to help him land the concept.
Germany also failed to talk truthfully about the Holocaust directly after World War II. People who tried to address the genocide were shouted down. But by the 1960s, in West Germany, the children of those who perpetrated the abuses or did nothing to stop them, demanded a reckoning. When East and West Germany reunited in the 1990s, the new German state made the Holocaust, the rise of Nazism and the country’s role in instigating the war a central part of the cultural memory of the German people.
“I think that is quite remarkable” Stevenson said, “we need to understand that before we say, oh, we can’t talk about that in the United States because we’ll get defined by that, we’ll be overwhelmed by that.”
America’s Shadow
It is difficult not to see the attacks on Secretary Bunch and Dr. Anthea Hartig through a discriminatory lens. In an attempt to prove an “activist political agenda” the unidentified authors, like thought police, pulled “selective excerpts” from past remarks and panel presentations that Dr. Hartig participated in (some dating back years) to attack her at least 100 times in the main body of the report (not counting mentions in the more than 500 footnotes).
Kennecott was taken back, writing, “More disturbing than the ignorance are moments when the report’s vitriol suggests an unhealthy obsessive cast of mind, like the idea that Hartig’s use of the word “problematize” is part of some revolutionary social justice agenda. Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”
OAH came to a similar conclusion, writing, “Reports of this ilk reveal less about the museums they target than about the anxieties of their authors.”
Racism, Voting Rights & the Midterms
On April 29, 2026, The U.S. Supreme Court pulled the last remaining teeth from the Voting Rights Act. The decision eliminated the ability to bring states to court when they redistrict in a way that dilutes minority votes and representation. It was the only enforcement mechanism left after a 2013 decision released states with a history of discrimination from having to get pre-clearance for changes to elections. In at least four recent opinions, the Court’s conservative majority has cited a “colorblind constitution”concept - a reframing that takes America back in time before the 14th and 15th Amendments. With its mention they have approved state remapping efforts that favor one political party over another.
Columnist Jamelle Bouie takes issue with the majority’s belief that the Constitution was ever actually blind to color, but, he says before the Reconstruction Amendments it was, “blind to racial discrimination, it was blind to racial oppression, it was blind to racial hierarchy, it was blind to the overwhelming power of the slave system. The Reconstruction Amendments gave the Constitution eyes to see and ears to hear; it gave the Constitution the tools to deal with the legacy of racism to deal with the legacy of slavery to actually enforce meaningful and substantive equality in this country.”
Since the end of the Civil War, ex-confederate states have consistently tried to thwart equality for those who had once been enslaved - sometimes with the help of Northerners who disagreed vehemently with slavery, but couldn’t bring themselves to support equality.
After President Johnson and Congress showed leniency towards ex-confederates, state assemblies across the south passed Black Codes to ensure inequality. Congress responded to their bad behavior with the 14th Amendment and a more rigid, “Radical” Reconstruction.
In order to rejoin the Union, states wrote new constitutions, agreed to the 14th and 15th Amendments and promised to guarantee voting rights and outlaw discrimination based on color. But once the states regained representation in Congress, Black votes, when allowed to be cast, were often not counted. First class tickets on street cars were not honored. Jury boxes remained the domain of white people. Protests ensued and Congress investigated.
Then came the Enforcement Acts to make the newly reunited states honor voting rights, stop discrimination and protect Black people from mob violence. The recently formed Department of Justice successfully indicted more than 3,000 Klan members between 1870-1872. Then Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1875 enshrining these protections once more in statute and putting federal courts in charge of cases alleging civil rights violations.
In a series of rulings in the mid-1870s the Supreme Court pushed back. They narrowly interpreted the 14th and 15th amendments refusing to stop businesses from discriminating and giving state courts purview over allegations of racial discrimination and violence within their borders. White mobs were liberated while Black victims were denied recourse.
Then, in 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act. Their decisions made way for the rapid rise of Jim Crow.
But in 1954, when Black lawyers brought cases to the Supreme Court showing that the South was not adhering to their own "separate but equal” rules, the court reversed course. Suddenly, the majority began using the 14th Amendment as intended by Congress… to protect individual rights.
The Court’s Brown v. Board decision invalidating school segregation did not go over well, it inspired the South to rise again in the form of Massive Resistance. Ultimately, the people, raised on the false history known as the Lost Cause, set up dual private/public school systems, many of which still operate and continue to keep Americans separated while threatening the funding of free education.
But the Brown victory had an entirely different effect on Black Americans, encouraging them to continue to nonviolently protest all forms of segregation and discrimination. Their great personal sacrifices made it clear that although discrimination was unconstitutional, it was still practiced.
Congress was convinced. They approved the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But the ex-confederate states continued to obfuscate. Activists continued to march and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act [VRA] was signed into law.
Then in 1980, the Supreme Court weakened the VRA, deciding in City of Mobile v. Bolden that Section Two was merely a restatement of the Fifteenth Amendment that prohibited states from adopting voting laws that were “intentionally enacted or maintained for discriminatory purposes.” This decision, like the one in April, freed up states to use race neutral language to “obscure their intentions” and put the burden on minorities to prove intentionality, which EJI says, is very difficult to prove.
At that time, Congress disagreed. The Court had misinterpreted their intent and on a bipartisan basis on June 29, 1982, they amended the VRA to give Section Two some much needed teeth. The new law allowed plaintiffs to point to results to show that a state election law was having a discriminatory impact on a community.
Congress's actions frustrated a young John Roberts Jr., who had lobbied against the measures. His argument to Congressmen? The Constitution is “color-blind” and prohibits decisions based on race even if it is to redress discrimination.
The new law resulted in a surge of Black people being elected to school boards, city councils, county commissions and other governing bodies - proving that Congress got it right. A few years later, in 1986, the US Supreme Court changed course, finding in Thornburg v. Gingles that a North Carolina map eliminated the possibility for Black citizens to choose their representatives at the ballot box. The majority upheld Congress's intent.
The Dismantling
Since joining the Supreme Court, Roberts has overseen a steady whittling down of the VRA and then a weaponizing of it in favor of the Republican Party.
On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down Article Five, that required states known to act in discriminatory ways in the past, to submit changes to their elections to the federal authorities for preclearance. In the decision, the Court said they were letting states off the hook because “things had changed dramatically” since 1965. A statement that seems to evoke a widely held misinterpretation that because America elected Barack Obama President the nation had moved into a post-racial era. It is another example why it is so important for Americans to know the truth about the past and understand the role race has played throughout our history.
Still, in his decision, Roberts seemed to attempt to reassure skeptics, according to Sherrlyn Ifill of the 14th Amendment Center at Howard University. She told Jon Stewart that Roberts wrote, “don’t worry, you still have another part of the Voting Rights Act that is really strong and you can use that, it's Section Two, it’s nationwide. You are okay because you still have Section Two.”
Since the 2013 ruling, a slew of election and voter laws have been approved in states that used to have to get a pre-clearance. The Brennen Center has said that many of the new laws would have previously been barred from implementation, and several have been “struck down or enjoined as racially discriminatory.”
Then in April 2026 -
“They took Section Two,” Ifill told Stewart. After assuring Americans not to worry about eliminating preclearance, the majority spiked the racial disparity test measure.
The ruling lets states weaken minority citizen’s voting power - including eliminating whole voting districts - without consequence as long as they say they did it for partisan reasons. They placed the burden to prove racial discrimination on plaintiffs.
“In the name of a colorblind Constitution and the equal protection of the laws, then, the Supreme Court has given the green light to a gleeful attempt to end Black political representation at the state and federal levels,” Bouie wrote.
The decision reverses an act of Congress and overturns their own 1986 decision in Thornburg vs. Gingles. In a dissent, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson stated they were “deeply skeptical of the majority opinion.”
The bipartisan Campaign Legal Center found the decision to be “contrary” to the VRA, the U.S. Constitution, and Congress’ intent. They said this decision will impact the freedom to vote for millions of Americans. They called it a complete reversal that sends the country back in time.
The Brennan Center expects many jurisdictions to see the Court’s May decision as an invitation to “return to the racially discriminatory systems that previously entrenched the power of white voters at the expense of minority communities,” according to a "Friend of the Court Brief.
The conservative majority’s ruling accelerated an unusual Presidential push for mid-decade redistricting among Republican-controlled legislatures in a mid-term election year. Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee took action immediately to switch congressional maps. They joined seven other states in a race to gerrymander in time for November’s elections.
Democratic led states were close to releveling the playing field after a narrow majority of Virginia voters approved a one-time, mid-decade map that favored Democrats. Then a Virginia Court threw out the will of the voters. The Democratic Attorney General appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s emergency docket but on May 15th the Justices refused to weigh in.
Yet, on June 2, the Supreme Court did the exact opposite for Republican controlled Alabama. Voting was already underway when the Attorney General asked the Supreme Court to allow the state to revert to an older voting map that would eliminate one of two minority majority districts in the seven district state.
The Supreme Court agreed and in an unsigned order cleared the way for Alabama to use the old map that the lower court said was racially discriminatory. That decision led with the words “our colorblind Constitution” - the first time in history the Supreme Court cited the concept so prominently, according to legal experts and reporting by Julian Mark.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was joined again by Justices Kagan and Jackson in dissent. She accused the court of creating chaos in an election that had already begun, votes already cast for candidates in districts that would no longer exist on the map, adding that the majority “disregards both democratic values and the Rule of Law.”
Bouie was equally upset with the Court for denying fair political representation to Black voters in Alabama. “What this court is doing is building the same kind of color blind Constitution that gave us Jim Crow, oppression and so much worse,” he said.
Justice Thurgood Marshall would likely have agreed. He would likely have let his colleagues know, as he did in his time, that their manipulation and improper distinctions with the Constitution and the will of Congress, “makes this court an accessory to the perpetuation of racial discrimination.”
America’s Divided Soul
“We are in a second Lost Cause,” Glaude said in an interview. “It’s an epistemic assault. What do I mean by that? …It’s an assault on what we know and how we know, what we see and how we see.”
The Lost Cause history that redeemed the South but trapped Americans in a false story was the exact opposite of accountability. When Christian Science Monitor’s Ken Makin took his family to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama. His 7-year-old son asked, “Dad, why do those Black people have chains on them?” Makin said he understands why some people might lie in that moment, but, he added,
“I can assure you the folks who might do so don’t have Black children” and when truth is absent, misinformation and disinformation flourish. He said he told his son about slavery and then he told him about freedom. Makin summed up the problem with “whitewashing slavery and American history in general is that it eliminates the road map to critical thinking and accountability.”
Accountability is the key, according to Stevenson.
In South Africa when Apartheid ended, there was a change in power and a reckoning to deal with the history of segregation and human rights violations.
In Germany, after the Nazis lost the war, the world held trials and the perpetrators did not resume power. Future generations of Germans didn’t rewrite history so they might feel better. Today, they have a landscape that remembers the Holocaust, they have safeguarded the facts of their history and built a strong memory culture.
In the United States, there hasn’t been a shift in power, Stevenson says, adding, “The people who benefited from enslavement didn’t have to forfeit all that they benefited from. The people who actually fought against the United States were quickly restored into power and didn’t have to give up anything as a result of that. The people who lynched others were never held accountable. Even in the 1960s…the moment we are in now is a consequence because we never required accountability. We didn’t even require people who disenfranchised Black people for over a century to say, ‘I’m sorry,’” he said.
In fact, according to Stevenson, most of the southern politicians who disenfranchised Black people voted against the Voting Rights Act in 1965, then began “scheming for ways to maintain political disenfranchisement. It is the absence of reckoning that allows the problems that contribute to these issues to continue.”
Every time the truth is sidelined, a full account left half told, an act of discrimination harms one person or a community, an entire district, a whole state, a moral injury is sustained not just by Black people, but by white too. Our refusal to live in relationship with each other and with our shared history has caused a split in the nation’s conscience leaving us with what Goude calls, a “divided soul.”
The soul of this nation is torn in two as we experience our 250th Anniversary, because, Goude posits, America “imagines itself at once a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and you can’t hold those two things together without contradiction, without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country, which sends us spiraling through these cycles every generation.”
Freedom and personal liberation are the fruits of sharing the truth. Nothing good comes from hiding it under a basket and choosing an easier path that feels better. The Founders selected the motto pluribus et unum for a reason - they had hope in our capacity to come together - lets stop cycling through the same worn stories expecting a different outcome and choose the way of truth, equality and justice.
Additional Reading
The impact the “colorblind” attitude has on equality is described in this 2021 article by Heather McGee.
Upcoming Events
Remembering Benjamin Thomas
August 8
Southwest Corner of Fairfax and King Streets
Free
Around midnight on August 8,1899, a 16-year-old African American teenager named Benjamin Thomas was lynched in Alexandria, Virginia. While waiting for a grand jury to be impaneled, the youth was put in the City Jail on St. Asaph Street. Without waiting for due process, Alexandrians formed into a mob, easily overcame police and dragged Benjamin Thomas half a mile to the Southwest corner of King and Fairfax streets where they shot and hanged him. Although the Mayor and other public officials spoke to the mob in an effort to stop the lynching they didn’t hold any responsible or accountable for the Thomas kidnaping and murder. Alexandria’s African American citizens were outraged but were also intimidated and forced to stay indoors for days after the lynching. In the aftermath, both white and Black Alexandrians agreed that Thomas was innocent of any wrongdoing. The Thomas’s, like Joseph McCoy’s family two years earlier, left Alexandria.
The site of the lynching of Benjamin Thomas will hoist a banner indicating A Man Was Lynched Here the week of Aug. 8, 2026 in Remembrance of Benjamin Thomas. In addition, please visit Benjamin Thomas’ In Memoriam page on the ACRP website to learn more about the upcoming Aug. 28, 2026 Benjamin Thomas Remembrance Event, learn more about what happened to Thomas and see how Alexandria has remembered and memorialized him in past years.
An Evening in Remembrance of Benjamin Thomas
Civil Rights in Uncertain Times
A Conversation with NAACP’s Myesha Braden
Music by Charles E. Miller
Friday, August 28
Shiloh Baptist Church, 1401 Jaimeson Avenue
Doors open 6:30 p.m.
Program 7-8 p.m.
Who’s history? Our history. Who’s rights? Our rights. When factual history is buried, people are polarized, hate groups menace commuters on the metro, all aspects of life become uncertain, even constitutional rights. The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project invites the public to Shiloh Baptist Church for an Evening in Remembrance of Benjamin Thomas featuring a conversation with NAACP’s Myesha Braden. An attorney with the NAACP, Braden, is involved in fighting state and national attacks on voting rights.
The hour long event is being held on the same day in 1899 that more than 600 people gathered at the historic Shiloh Baptist Church on Duke Street to memorialize Thomas and protest his and all lynchings. The program will also feature music by Charles E. Miller and Mayor Gaskins will give remarks. The annual event that is free and open to the public.
That same night, tours of the historic sanctuary where the Mass Meeting & Memorial for Thomas was held in 1899 will be available from 5:30-6:30 at 1400 Duke Street. The Freedom House, a museum that shares the story of Alexandria’s role in the domestic slave trade at 1315 Duke Street, will also be open for tours until 6:30 p.m.
Alexandria People’s Assembly African American Studies Series
Sunday, August 30
2-4:30 p.m.
Charles Houston Recreation Center
901 Wythe Street, Alexandria
Free, Registration Required opens in August
Join the Alexandria People’s Assembly as the group builds community and empowers advocacy with a session on African American history. For more information contact PLTI, Alexandria People’s Assembly.
In the News
Historic Alexandria Announces Publication of City Hall, Market Square, and Slavery Documentary Study
In recognition of Alexandria’s dedication and drive to saving, sharing, and studying history in Virginia, Historic Alexandria received a Commonwealth History Fund grant from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC) in February 2025 to produce an in-depth history of Alexandria’s Market Square. Dr. Greg A. Beaman conducted this major research project to better understand the history of this important and well-known space. For more than 275 years, Market Square has served as the seat of local government and a key economic hub while functioning as a space of enslavement and racial oppression. The project’s findings will inform future efforts to interpret and share the complex history of this early urban center.
The report can be found online at alexandriava.gov/go/7216. The report is accompanied by a collection of StoryMaps that tell the stories of enslaved and free Black people whose lives intersected with the square using maps and images.
If you want to learn more, or hear the author present the paper, consider attending the Alexandria Forum on Sept. 18, “Nothing But Independence”: Alexandria and the Revolutionary War at the Lyceum. Tickets are $60 per person, $40 for OHA members and students.
Celebration of Moses Stevens Street
On Saturday, July 11, Mayor Alyia Gaskins, members of the City Council Naming Committee, and staff from the Office of Historic Alexandria hosted a Rededication Ceremony at the Alexandria Black History Museum to honor Moses Stevens’s legacy and celebrate his descendants. This celebration was part of the City’s multi-year Street Renaming and Rededication process. The rededication of Stevens St. removed an honor previously granted to a Confederate figure, instead uplifting an individual whose contributions reflect Alexandria's present-day values, a symbolic but meaningful milestone for our community. Stevens, Black, was a pioneering entrepreneur in post-Civil War Alexandria. He operated a successful livery business, founded Mt. Jezreel Baptist Church, and was among the first in the city to adopt both telephone and automotive infrastructure. An article about him “Life and Times of the Livery Man: The story of Moses Stevens” by Char McCargo Bah is available on the Alexandria Gazette Packet’s website.
EJI’s Bryan Stevenson on the Ezra Klein Show
In an interview with Ezra Klein on July 3, Bryan Stevenson tried to explain how we went from the mass protests of 2020 to today. He said, the movement wasn’t rooted in truth. “We didn’t require people to know the history of police violence against Black people. We didn’t require people to understand the nature of the struggle over 400 years. We just allowed people to walk with a sign and that was it. And so I think it has to be rooted. When I talk about an era of Truth and Justice and repair and truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, I think those things are sequential. I don’t think you can skip the truth telling part and get to the beautiful R word. I think we make a mistake when we do that.”
Current ACRP Projects
ACRP is dedicated to finding ways to research and share our past with Alexandrians and visitors in an effort to build a relationship with our past that will move us toward truth and reconciliation. In addition to our newsletter that features Alexandria’s untold histories or unique perspectives on our past, ACRP has three major projects moving our community forward together.
The Committee of Inquiry into Post-Civil War Alexandria (COI) is engaged in significant research to comprehensively document the history of the city from the close of the Civil War until the passage of the 1902 Constitution. The resulting report will right the historic record and provide recommendations for remedies wherever possible.
The Remembrance Student Club’s Banned Truth Tour exposes Alexandria City High School Students to this city’s historic African American communities, the role our town played in the domestic slave trade, the Black experience during the Civil War, Alexandria’s Reconstruction Leaders and then the local fight against Jim Crow and segregation. On a series of field trips, students learn from experts as well as community members connected to this history. The tour culminates in a showcase of student work with the community.
The Faith Initiative is a loose federation of Alexandria's historic bodies of faith that are working to develop and deepen relationships across congregations and faith to support the greater Alexandria community. To honor the 250th anniversary of America, the clergy have been visiting historic Black and white churches in Alexandria to learn more about our shared past.
Upcoming Committee Meetings
The Committee of Inquiry next meets on Monday, Aug. 31 at 7 pm at Alexandria Black History Museum.
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project Steering Committee will meet Wednesday, Sept. 9 at 5:30 p.m. at Alexandria Black History Museum.
Alexandria Community Remembrance Project
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP) is a city-wide initiative dedicated to helping Alexandria understand its history of racial terror hate crimes and to work toward creating a welcoming community bound by equity and inclusion.
In Memoriam
Write "ACRP" in Comments on the donation form.
Office of Historic Alexandria
City of Alexandria, Virginia
ACRP@alexandriava.gov