The Trump/MAGA/white supremacist administration is ordering the removal of displays of information and depictions of the era of slavery in the United States. One of the most emblematic images of enslavement is the graphic and soul-shocking image called “The Scourged Back” that depicts the back of Peter Gordon, photographed circa 1863 in Louisiana.
It graphically shows his bare back with healed but visible keloid scars. The photograph of his scarred back yells loudly the horrors and brutality of enslavement. The wounds on Peter Gordon’s back were inflicted on him by his so-called owner.
The Whitewashing of America
To remove the histories and experiences of Black people in the U.S. is part of the educational pogrom enacted to “whitewash” America’s real history. To “whitewash” history is the political project to change the narrative of America and make that narrative into the blessings and triumphs of white people, while ignoring the blemishes, scars, and overcoming that is as great a part of America’s history as any other.
The institution of slavery in the British colonies of North America began in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. It doesn’t legally end until 1865. A Civil War had to be fought to settle the question and end the legal institution of slavery. And even when slavery had legally ended, new systems and schemes were developed, particularly in the southern U.S., to re-institute slavery de facto.
This system, called Jim Crow, would continue through to its painstaking dismantlement by courageous individuals and movements that exposed it and brought about its demise. This means that formal enslavement lasted for 246 years. Then the era of Jim Crow lasted for at least another 100 years, and its effects still persist for many today.
In 2026, the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday. In those 250 years of existence, in comparison, there are 247 years of enslavement. Then, there is de facto enslavement, called Jim Crow or American Apartheid, that lasts for at least another 100 years.
A Dead and Empty Narrative
So, there is no way that America was born, existed, or its story told without the story of Black people, and for most of us, our saga from enslavement to liberation, and from hardships to overcoming. To remove the histories and narratives of Black people in North America is like removing the heart from a living body, and along with its heart, it also loses its soul.
The body and its story without Black history is really a dead and empty narrative and will remain so until America has the courage to tell the whole story.
The American narrative is the statue of Liberty greeting scores of people arriving at Ellis Island. The words on a bronze plaque invite: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. And in the statute’s left hand, in the form of a tablet, is the date July 4, 1776.
The Genealogical Brick Wall
There is a limitation in knowing the full history of most Black people. This is because we were treated as property and given names for inventory — bought, sold, raped, and worked to death. Doing genealogies, there is usually a brick wall that Black families encounter. What we do know exists through oral traditions that attempt to teach and convey to us experiences and history in a world where we live and work, but never existed.
The other story for me is before Ellis Island. My family arrived on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. This was a major marketplace and auction block for the precious and enriching cargo of Black people. When talking to my family, it seems from the narrative that they and their descendants were on the same plantation in South Carolina for at least 200 years — 46 years, more or less, shy of the existence of this country.
Denying Our Existence and Contributions
There have been ludicrous reasons presented for removing images and memories of slavery. One is that it makes white people feel guilty. The Trump/MAGA/white supremacist administration says it is “corrosive ideology” which means that a new ideology is being fomented. Evidently, the current ideological narrative that includes slavery and overcoming that ordeal somehow eats away and corrodes the so-called American narrative.
In reality, those who are being bothered and feel corroded are the people who want to sanitize and de-color the real history of America. It is not that they are embarrassed by the brutal history of enslavement, but they embrace a politically racialized framework proffering that the history, experiences, and existence of Black people don’t really exist.
This administration has proven how racialized it is. Their efforts through DOGE cost 350,000 Black women their jobs. Mobs called law enforcement, some in masks and with no identification, roam the streets removing Brown and Black immigrants. They have succeeded in some circles at criminalizing immigrants so that they could carry out their agenda of removing non-whites from the population. And not recognizing the presence and history of Black people is to render in perception, historical understanding, and official narrative the pronouncement and indoctrination that the United States is a white Christian nation without blemish or scar.
We Will Not Be Silenced
A scripture says that “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk to them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.”
Our story will be told despite this racist agenda of erasure. We will talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. We will tell the story into generations, and we will become loud about who we are, what we have experienced, how we have overcome the impossible with possibilities, and declared, no matter how hard we have been pressed down and ignored, in the spirit of Maya Angelou, “Still I rise!”
And so will the history of our experiences rise to the heavens and invade all of American history, and we will not be erased.
Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler is the senior advisor at the Fellowship of Reconciliation–USA, director and chief visionary of Faith Strategies, LLC, and pastor emeritus of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ.