Legal experts detail pitfalls of Trump’s campaign to whitewash US history

President Lyndon B. Johnson meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the White House on March 18, 1966

President Donald Trump is attacking universities and museums, including the Smithsonian, for what he considers a "woke" or overly negative take on U.S. history.

As Trump sees it, they are pay too much attention to the bad things that happened in the United States in the past. But Trump's opponents counter that discussing past atrocities — slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) terrorism, the Civil War draft riots in New York City — is necessary in order to avoid repeating them. Presidential historian Jon Meacham, a frequent guest on MSNBC, often argues that examining the darker side of U.S. history is, in fact, patriotic and part of the ongoing struggle "for a more perfect union."

During a conversation for the New York Times' opinion section published on September 10, legal expert/former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin and fellow attorney Bryan Stevenson (founder and leader of the Equal Justice Initiative) examined the Trump administration's efforts to whitewash U.S. history.

When Toobin asked Stevenson why "history" is "so important," he responded, "Well, I think when we are honest about history, we learn things, we discover things and we prepare for things differently. I got involved in our work after I went to Johannesburg and saw the apartheid museum there. It blew me away because I'd never been in a museum that was so honest about the legacy of something so devastating."

Stevenson continued, "I went to Berlin, and being in Berlin, seeing a landscape where you can't go 200 meters without seeing a monument or a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, there's this reckoning with history. And we now see Germany as a partner; they are not the villain that they were in the middle of the 20th Century because of that reckoning."

Germany, Stevenson emphasized, candidly discusses its horrors of the past in order to avoid repeating them — and the U.S. needs to do the same.

"There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin," Stevenson told Toobin. "There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And I think that has liberated them, empowered them to create a new democracy that is trusted, respected, vibrant and that's growing…. We have not done that in this country. And I think our refusal to do that has left us vulnerable to precisely the kind of political manipulations that we’re seeing today."

Steven continued, "So we’re trying to create that truth-telling here. I think some people misjudge it; they think, 'Oh, you keep talking about slavery and lynching and segregation. You want to punish America for this history.' I have no interest in punishment. I'm talking about slavery, liberation and segregation because I want to liberate us from the burden that that history creates — that burden that still hangs over us, the fog that that history has created that no one is trying to address."

Read Jeffrey Toobin and Bryan Stevenson's full conversation for The New York Times at this link (subscription required).