Slavery Exhibit Removed—Activists Sound Alarm on Biden-Era Censorship

Paul Riverbank, 2/1/2026As Black history faces new censorship, activists foster resilience through grassroots teaching and creative adaptation.

DeRay Mckesson, whose measured cadence belies his sense of urgency, was blunt: “It’s scary and unprecedented.” He’d just come off the phone with teachers in Pennsylvania, where administrators suddenly removed a slavery exhibit from a well-trafficked National Park. The ripple effects from political edicts—Mckesson blames the White House for an unspoken threat—stretch far beyond any single city. “States and cities are nervous about retribution,” he told me. “Even good people keep their heads down.”

But the real story, this centennial year, isn’t about fear alone. Carter G. Woodson’s legacy—born from the conviction that honest education is liberation—seems to be running through the veins of a new generation. As the hundred-year mark approaches, a groundswell of grassroots campaigns has surged. “We still get books into classrooms,” Mckesson says, referencing a cross-country curriculum project uniting over 150 educators. In schoolrooms tucked away from Twitter’s glare, students leaf through new lesson plans centered not just on struggle, but on the thinkers and builders who’ve shaped Black America.

Take, for example, Angélique Roché. Last spring, she was invited to capture the remarkable story of Opal Lee in graphic novel form. “Saying yes was easy,” Roché confided one blustery day, her voice brightening when she recalled meeting Lee in Texas: a hundred candles on her metaphorical cake and a thousand stories to tell. Roché’s “First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth” brims with painstaking research—you can feel the Texas heat in its pages, hear the cadence of Lee’s voice, and sense the quiet fortitude of Lee’s mother, Mattie Broadous Flake, and pioneers like William “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald. “At the end of the day,” Roché affirms, “what the story should actually tell people is that we’re far more alike than we are different.”

Not every intervention is a book or a curriculum. There are teach-ins, late-night study groups, and gatherings in community centers that don’t show up in press releases. Jarvis Givens, a thoughtful historian at Harvard, channeled his own response to this fraught moment by writing “I’ll Make Me a World.” Its essays are neither dry nor distant; instead, they search for the through-lines in Black history—myth-busting, yes, but also tending the roots that Woodson once planted. “I wanted to honor the centennial,” Givens explained, “and remind us this work is both scholarship and survival.” He’s taken the project further, launching a “living history campaign”—training students not just to absorb stories, but to investigate, to record, to shape how we remember.

As I spoke with Robert Trent Vinson, a Carter G. Woodson biographer, it became clear just how cyclical these struggles are. Woodson’s own parents, formerly enslaved, likely could not have imagined their son sitting in Harvard’s lecture halls. Yet they surely understood the risks of telling truths in hostile environments—a lesson not lost on organizers today. “He’d see all this pushback as a sign you’re on the right track,” Vinson mused. The term he used—'fugitivity'—lingers. Black history, he argues, often flourishes in the shadows: church basements, covert study clubs, family gatherings where resilience is quietly modeled.

It’s tempting to declare every backlash a new front in an old war, yet that risks flattening the very differences Woodson valued. DEI debates and legislative rollbacks have surfaced in fresh forms, prompting fear but also fueling creativity. There are parents now recording oral histories on smartphones, teachers improvising lesson plans that thread around newly imposed limits, artists finding ways to sidestep censorship. In these spaces—more scattered than coordinated—Black history’s future quietly takes root.

As the month closes, the air in schools and libraries carries a different charge. There is no fanfare of easy celebration. Instead, what persists is a quiet charge: Remember. Teach. Bear witness. If the ceremonies honoring Woodson’s vision feel less exuberant, they are no less urgent. The facts, after all, remain: The stories outlast the silence. And so, another generation picks up the thread, determined, against the headwinds, to stitch its chapter into the American story.

In a year shadowed by unease, Black history advocates find themselves walking a tightrope—caught between mounting pressure and a determination that feels almost ancestral. February’s official recognition of Black History Month was, at least on paper, a sign of progress. Yet speaking with those on the front lines—as I did over a series of recent conversations—you sense a storm passing overhead. Where optimism once reigned, there’s now a quieter caution paired with a gritty refusal to slow down.DeRay Mckesson, whose measured cadence belies his sense of urgency, was blunt: “It’s scary and unprecedented.” He’d just come off the phone with teachers in Pennsylvania, where administrators suddenly removed a slavery exhibit from a well-trafficked National Park. The ripple effects from political edicts—Mckesson blames the White House for an unspoken threat—stretch far beyond any single city. “States and cities are nervous about retribution,” he told me. “Even good people keep their heads down.”But the real story, this centennial year, isn’t about fear alone. Carter G. Woodson’s legacy—born from the conviction that honest education is liberation—seems to be running through the veins of a new generation. As the hundred-year mark approaches, a groundswell of grassroots campaigns has surged. “We still get books into classrooms,” Mckesson says, referencing a cross-country curriculum project uniting over 150 educators. In schoolrooms tucked away from Twitter’s glare, students leaf through new lesson plans centered not just on struggle, but on the thinkers and builders who’ve shaped Black America.Take, for example, Angélique Roché. Last spring, she was invited to capture the remarkable story of Opal Lee in graphic novel form. “Saying yes was easy,” Roché confided one blustery day, her voice brightening when she recalled meeting Lee in Texas: a hundred candles on her metaphorical cake and a thousand stories to tell. Roché’s “First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth” brims with painstaking research—you can feel the Texas heat in its pages, hear the cadence of Lee’s voice, and sense the quiet fortitude of Lee’s mother, Mattie Broadous Flake, and pioneers like William “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald. “At the end of the day,” Roché affirms, “what the story should actually tell people is that we’re far more alike than we are different.”Not every intervention is a book or a curriculum. There are teach-ins, late-night study groups, and gatherings in community centers that don’t show up in press releases. Jarvis Givens, a thoughtful historian at Harvard, channeled his own response to this fraught moment by writing “I’ll Make Me a World.” Its essays are neither dry nor distant; instead, they search for the through-lines in Black history—myth-busting, yes, but also tending the roots that Woodson once planted. “I wanted to honor the centennial,” Givens explained, “and remind us this work is both scholarship and survival.” He’s taken the project further, launching a “living history campaign”—training students not just to absorb stories, but to investigate, to record, to shape how we remember.As I spoke with Robert Trent Vinson, a Carter G. Woodson biographer, it became clear just how cyclical these struggles are. Woodson’s own parents, formerly enslaved, likely could not have imagined their son sitting in Harvard’s lecture halls. Yet they surely understood the risks of telling truths in hostile environments—a lesson not lost on organizers today. “He’d see all this pushback as a sign you’re on the right track,” Vinson mused. The term he used—'fugitivity'—lingers. Black history, he argues, often flourishes in the shadows: church basements, covert study clubs, family gatherings where resilience is quietly modeled.It’s tempting to declare every backlash a new front in an old war, yet that risks flattening the very differences Woodson valued. DEI debates and legislative rollbacks have surfaced in fresh forms, prompting fear but also fueling creativity. There are parents now recording oral histories on smartphones, teachers improvising lesson plans that thread around newly imposed limits, artists finding ways to sidestep censorship. In these spaces—more scattered than coordinated—Black history’s future quietly takes root.As the month closes, the air in schools and libraries carries a different charge. There is no fanfare of easy celebration. Instead, what persists is a quiet charge: Remember. Teach. Bear witness. If the ceremonies honoring Woodson’s vision feel less exuberant, they are no less urgent. The facts, after all, remain: The stories outlast the silence. And so, another generation picks up the thread, determined, against the headwinds, to stitch its chapter into the American story.