Editor’s introduction: We have documented 100 crimes in this series so far, and we intend to continue documenting more. But the crime of suppressing the truth—denying people the ability to understand the true history of their society—deserves special mention. While we focus below on how this has played out—and is sharply playing out today—against Black people, let this stand for the more universal crime of whitewashing history that this country has always engaged in and which is now being qualitatively intensified by the fascist regime in power.

***

250 Years of Suppressing the True History of Black People

For over 300 years Black people have been brutally oppressed by this system from the time of slavery, to the time of the Jim Crow era with all its lynchings, to today with its mass incarceration, murder by police, and now, once again attacking and restricting Black people’s right to vote.

From the beginnings of this country, there have been those who have attempted to justify the crimes of this country and evade the truth of its history. This is all the more glaring with the lies and distortions about the history and reality of slavery and the struggles of Black people over generations for their liberation. 

Beginning in the early 1800s, false versions of the history of Black people were written in history books and systematically taught to generations of youth. As Donald Yacovone sums up in his book Teaching White Supremacy: “[According to these writers,] the Negro of plantation days was usually happy. He was fond of the company of others and liked to sing, dance, crack jokes, and laugh; he admired bright colors and was proud to wear a red or orange bandana…He was never in a hurry, and was always ready to let things go until the morrow. Most of the planters learned not to whip, but loyalty, based upon pride, kindness, and rewards, brought best returns.”¹

John H. Van Evrie deserves particular mention. Van Evrie’s portrayal of slavery and slaves was followed by many historians who used Van Evrie’s proposition that “espoused the concept that the different races were six distinct species with the Caucasian superior to all others and that any attempt to abolish slavery would ‘result in the universal degradation and destruction of the white blood of America, with the consequent overthrow of republican institutions, and, indeed, the civilization and Christianity of the New World.’”² Van Evrie was the father of white supremacy in U.S. history books. Donald Yacovone describes Van Evrie as a “toxic combination of Joseph Goebbels, Steve Bannon and Rupert Murdoch…."³ Indeed for Van Evrie, degrading African Americans as a subspecies was essential for creating nineteenth-century American democracy and an enduring white identity.⁴

In various forms, this narrative continued through the decades.

The Fight for Black History

While Black scholars like W.E.B. Dubois did groundbreaking work beginning in the late 1890s, it was in the 1960s when the demand for the truth about Black history spread through society. Huge struggles for Black studies erupted in high schools and colleges across the country as part of a larger movement to demand: to learn the truth about this country. One pivotal student strike took place in 1968 at San Francisco State University. It lasted five months and ended in victory with the creation of a College of Ethnic Studies; which included the first Black studies department ever established.⁵ But there were literally hundreds of other such struggles in high schools and colleges all over the country.

The revolutionary upsurge in the ’60s unleashed a new generation of scholars who worked to do groundbreaking research and bring out the true history of this horrific system. There was a flourishing of new works, fiction and nonfiction speaking to the true history of slavery and the oppression of Black people…authors and historians like James Baldwin, Manning Marable, Alex Haley, Howard Zinn and Thomas Sugrue. More than a few not only told the truth in plain language of the crimes committed against Black people over centuries, but dug into the effects and the logic of a system that demanded those crimes and the lies that had justified the horrific oppression over centuries. And many explored the economic relations at the foundation of and driving forward these horrors. The real histories of resistance—including slave rebellions—were brought to light. 

This truth and understanding has also now found expression in numerous valuable books, and that research in turn fed into the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the (“Black Smithsonian”) in Washington, D.C. that is both part of the Smithsonian Museum complex and devoted to the history of the African-American people in the U.S. This museum has hosted 13 million visitors since its opening ten years ago and its materials online have been viewed by tens of millions more.⁶

Fast forward to today where the fascists are fanatically attempting to erase the true history of this country. With the rising to power of the fascist Trump regime, the hammer is coming down. As BA points out: 

These fascists are determined not to let something like that happen again, in these highly charged times—and instead they are setting out to mold a bunch of mindless white youth into rabid racists (similar to the Hitler Youth in Germany during the rise of the NAZI fascists there in the 1930s).⁷

The Trump Fascist Regime’s Attack on Black History

President Donald Trump has been at the forefront of this attack on the true history of Black people. He issued an Executive Order Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.⁸ One of its aims is to end telling the truth about the horrible facts of slavery, in what it calls indoctrinating “children in radical, anti-American ideologies.” His Executive Order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History⁹ is aimed at eliminating exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, known as the Black Smithsonian. (For more on this, see Lenny Wolff’s article, The Whitewashing of the American Brain: Behind Trump’s Fascist War on Historical Truth.) On social media Trump posted, “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.”¹⁰ (See “New Attack on the Smithsonian” below.)

According to NBC News, 32 items have been removed from the Black Smithsonian, including Harriet Tubman’s book of hymns filled with gospels that she is believed to have sung as she led enslaved people to freedom through the underground railroad and the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”¹¹

Trump also had items removed from national parks that he said were “disparaging Americans.” At the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the President's House Site, where George and Martha Washington lived when the Capital was in Philadelphia, “the informational panels that discussed Washington’s ownership of enslaved people and included details about the lives of people enslaved at the site, as well as information about the broader history of slavery” were removed.¹² At Fort Pulaski National Monument near Savannah, Georgia, Trump had the iconic photo of a slave with scars on his back removed.¹³ About the removal of items from the Philadelphia National Park, Kenyatta Johnson, the president of the Philadelphia City Council said, “African American history is American history, and this is an intentional effort to erase history and whitewash.”¹⁴

Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida, has issued the “Stop WOKE Act,” HB 7, that puts forward that you can’t teach students that “A person's moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.”¹⁵

The 2024 Republican Party platform called for cutting federal funding for schools alleged to be teaching critical race theory and “radical gender ideology.”¹⁶

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill that would have banned federal funding for teaching the 1619 Project¹⁷ in K-12 schools, describing the project as “a racially divisive, revisionist account of history” and calling slavery a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.”¹⁸

In January 2021, The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission produced The 1776 Report, called for states and school districts to “reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.”¹⁹

The Trump fascist regime has been restoring monuments to the Confederacy. These monuments are celebrations of slavery and lynch-mob white supremacy.

By 2025, the fascists had instituted over 20,000 cases of books being banned in public education and libraries in the U.S. The great majority of all the banned books are about slavery, the history and the oppressive conditions of Black people, Latinos, and Native people in this country, as well as books about LGBT people. These bans have occurred in 45 states and 451 school districts.²⁰

The Department of Defense under Pete Hegseth has banned close to 600 books in the 161 PreK-12 schools for children of active military personnel. Kasey Meehan of PEN America said, “This list paints an alarming picture of what the United States government doesn’t want American kids to access.”²¹

Librarians, teachers, students and others are fighting against these attempts to ban books. A documentary, Banned Together details how student activists are fighting book censorship in Beaufort, South Carolina.²²

The efforts by all these fascists to ban and remove the facts about slavery show the truth to Bob Avakian’s statement that “there is a direct line from the pro-slavery Confederacy, at the time of the Civil War, to the fascism of today, with its determination to make America once again openly, aggressively white supremacist, male supremacist, and anti-LGBT people.”²³

The Criminals

The founders of this country set the framework for the historical oppression of Black people. In the founding documents of this country they embedded protections for slavery²⁴ and the transatlantic slave trade²⁵ that actually guaranteed inequality for generations to come. The reality of their proclamation that “all men are created equal”²⁶ meant that those who were considered “equal” were white males, many of them slave owners. There was slavery, there was genocide of the Native peoples, and women had basically no rights. That lie continues today with the oppression of Black people, Native Americans, immigrants, LGBT people, and women with restricting their right to abortion.                  

All those who wrote history books that whitewashed slavery or portrayed it as something positive, and who refused to tell the truth about the history of the Native Americans, with very few exceptions until the 1960’s (and of those exceptions, most were Black, including W.E.B. DuBois). This included all the “foremost” and “most respected scholars” in the U.S.

The states—and the fascist movement—that currently are responsible for banning books and who refuse to teach the truth and actual facts about slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans; and all those who pass laws restricting the instruction of the true history of the oppression of Black people, Native Americans, and LGBT people.

President Donald Trump established the 1776 Commission, issued an Executive Order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which banned slavery exhibits from the Black Smithsonian and the national parks, and he issued an Executive Order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

The Alibi

The apologists for slavery say, “Yes, America has done bad things, but other empires and countries have been just as bad, or even worse—and, unlike them, we have our great system of democracy and the freedoms it brings.”²⁷ (The American Crime Series, shows the actual truth of the many horrible atrocities committed in the name of America against its peoples and against the people of the world.) 

Many historians emphasize that slavery “actually” was a benefit to the slaves, as part of the new fascist remaking of education and reinstituted racist brainwashing. In Florida, the fourth largest state in the union, new standards of education require middle school students to be taught that the experience of slavery was beneficial to African Americans because it helped them acquire skills.²⁸

Texas, the second largest state, has passed laws requiring specific curriculum and training school staff in social studies curriculum, which restricts teaching “The beginning of slavery constituted the true founding of the United States” and “That slavery and racism are anything other than betrayals of the authentic founding principles of the United States.”²⁹ Texas has banned 801 books across 22 school districts, more than any other state.³⁰

After the Civil War, history writers used what is known as the “Lost Cause” myth that the Civil War was fought over states rights not slavery, that the South was a superior civilization, home to an enlightened aristocracy with happy, loyal slaves.³¹ This myth was used to justify lynching, including what held the record for the biggest movie box office of all time well into the 1930s—Birth of a Nation.³²

The Real Motive

Capitalism in the U.S. has meant intensifying the exploitation and oppression of Black people. They have been on the forefront of facing terror and intimidation to keep them in the bottom place of society. White supremacists and the fanatic fascists of today are erasing the horrors of slavery and the continued oppression of Black people and others from the mind of America and as a way to continue to reinforce the way this system enforces and legitimizes its oppressive rule over the masses of Black people.

(The American Crime Series #2, (Part 1): The Atlantic Slave Trade—The Middle Passage, (Part 2): Slavery in America documents the crime of slavery and provides the facts on why, today, there is a whitewashing the true history slavery from the American consciousness. )

For the fascist Trump regime, there is a necessity to cohere, to hold the country and the system of capitalism-imperialism together around the proposition that the U.S. be a white supremacist, male supremacist country, based on, as BA says: “a whitewashed, chauvinistic view of ‘the superiority of western civilization’ and held together ideologically by an aggressively anti-scientific fundamentalist Christian zealotry.” It is essential to forging this coherence that the real, true history of the U.S. and specifically the truth of the enslavement and oppression of Black people through the 250 years of the existence of this country be obliterated and erased. Perpetuating and providing a “moral” excuse not only for the hundreds of years of brutality and oppression to this time, but beyond.

For the Trump fascist regime, the time of the Confederacy was the greatest time in this country. Slavery was not the history of Black people, but the history of white people, and, where they could, they whitewashed slavery out of the history of America as if it didn’t exist. 

With the rise to power of the Trump fascist regime, there has been a deliberate attempt at “dumbing down America,” where people are taught modes of thinking not based on reality and truth. Multiple narratives based on the “feelings” of those writing the history are posed as truth (e.g., the founding fathers were mostly anti-slavery, enslaved people were treated well, the South did not secede over slavery, the North was not complicit at all in slavery). The fascist Trump regime has been at the forefront of making sure that critical thinking and intellectual rigor have been reduced to these false narratives, training people how to think, that attempting to discover the truth about history is not as important as what you believe. They justify the lies about America. It is nothing but a continuation of the over 300 years of the oppression of Black people in this country.

In ANYTHING BUT THE TRUTH, Bob Avakian Exposes Lies, Distortions, Distractions and Evasions About the Murderous Oppression of Black People:

Throughout the centuries of Black people’s nightmare in America, there have been always those who have tried to justify all this with lies, distortions, distractions and attempts to evade the glaring truth: Some of the particular ways may have changed, in terms of how Black people have been continually subjected, over centuries, to the most savage oppression, but this oppression has continued because it is built into this system, and it can only finally be ended by overthrowing this system and bringing a radically different and much better system into being—one which does not require this oppression but instead has, as one of its most fundamental and crucial objectives and requirements, putting an end to this, at long last.