America’s 250th Is Repeating a Familiar Mistake

Over the past year, it has become increasingly clear that federal planners for the nation’s Semiquincentennial have little interest in acknowledging the central place of slavery in American history. 

Freedom 250, the initiative leading the White House’s 250th anniversary celebrations, fails to adequately address the impact slavery has had on our country. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, statues of enslavers have been relocated to Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, projects like the “Founders Museum” and traveling “Freedom Trucks” minimize or ignore the founders’ involvement in slavery.

The Trump administration has sought to remove exhibits and publications about slavery from National Park Service sites and has cut funding for grants that explore the history of the institution. While the scale and coordination of this effort is unique—using federal power not just to sidestep slavery but, at times, to erase it—the broader impulse is nothing new. 

Americans have long struggled over whether, and how, to confront slavery in moments of national commemoration. Nowhere is that struggle clearer than in debates over President George Washington, which have been a recurring feature of American public life for nearly 250 years.

Read more: We’ve Never Agreed About George Washington and Slavery

The persistence of these debates underscores just how difficult it is to resolve the question of slavery’s place in national commemorations of America’s history. Our disagreements about the history of slavery, or of the founders, are never simply about the past. They are about what we believe the nation is, what it stands for, and who belongs within it. America has never been one thing to all people, and our commemorations inevitably reflect that reality.

The 1932 commemoration of Washington’s 200th birthday, the “George Washington Bicentennial,” offers a particularly revealing precedent. Planning for the Washington Bicentennial began in 1926 with a nationwide address from President Calvin Coolidge, broadcast to what was then the largest radio audience in American history. Coolidge argued that earlier generations had placed Washington on a pedestal, transforming him into a “rather imaginary character” shaped by a “universal desire to worship his memory.” The result, he warned, was that “the real man among men” had been obscured.

Coolidge’s call resonated. Over the next six years, Americans set out to rediscover the “real” George Washington and to share that version with a mass audience. The scale of the effort was staggering. Newspapers published millions of articles about Washington. Radio broadcasts reached audiences across the country. At its peak, an estimated 16,000 commemorative programs took place every day during the nine-month celebration, totaling nearly five million events.

Washington’s presence saturated American life in a way unmatched before or since. Yet the mainstream Washington Bicentennial programming erased Washington’s involvement with slavery. 

This omission was hardly incidental. The mostly all-white planning bodies saw a nation in flux: many women had gained the right to vote, a new wave of immigrants streamed into American ports, and a growing number of Americans, especially Black Americans, began moving into cities. In this whirlwind of change, Washington’s involvement with slavery was simply beside the point.

Read more: America250 Cannot Celebrate Freedom While Honoring Slaveholders

Federal planners weren’t the only ones using the anniversary to uncover the “real” Washington. African American activists, intellectuals, and scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson shared their own visions of Washington’s legacy, one that focused squarely on his involvement in slavery. 

Du Bois, for example, published a pageant—a common form for sharing lessons from Washington’s life during his bicentennial—that placed Washington’s enslaving front and center. One scene depicts Washington taking roll call of the people he enslaved at Mount Vernon, while in another, Washington is upstaged by Black patriots of the American Revolution. Du Bois lamented the fact that “many Americans would write the history of this land with no memory” of the central role of African Americans. “Never was this narrowness of mind better shown,” he argued, “than in the celebration of the bi-Centenary of the man whom this country called father.”

Other scholars went further in foregrounding Washington’s history with slavery. Scholar Walter H. Mazyck’s 1932 book George Washington and the Negro was likely the first book devoted entirely to Washington’s history with race and slavery. With its publication timed to coincide with the Washington bicentennial, Mazyck noted that “as the master of slaves,” Washington had received “little consideration” in the minds of the public—a situation he sought to rectify with his book. 

Carter G. Woodson, who several years earlier had established “Negro History Week” to emphasize the importance of African American history, praised Mazyck’s effort to “discover the truth and uproot propaganda.” Woodson recognized that “some of Washington’s admirers will not enjoy seeing in print” the unsparing history Mazyck provided, but appreciated that it had arrived “in the nick of time,” just as the world was “turning its eyes upon George Washington.” Carl Murphy, publisher of the Baltimore Afro-American likewise celebrated Mazyck’s work. “The George Washington Bicentennial may canonize Saint George on his 200th anniversary,” Murphy wrote, “but for the facts you’ll prefer Mr. Mazyck’s book.”

These interventions were not simply about correcting the historical record. They were efforts to use the past to demand that Americans confront the realities of racial injustice in their own time, particularly the violence, disenfranchisement, and denial of civil rights so common in the era of Jim Crow. By centering slavery in their interpretations of Washington, Black Americans sought to claim a fuller place in the national story and to press for a more just future.

Even with the full weight of the federal government behind it, however, federal planners still couldn’t eliminate discussion of slavery from the anniversary. No single, top-down narrative was able to silence competing interpretations of the past. Americans argued, challenged, and reshaped the meaning of the commemoration in real time.

We have the same possibilities today. Across the country, history organizations and community groups are planning their own efforts to mark the 250th anniversary, many of which stand in stark contrast to the White House’s approach. 

The new exhibit opened at George Washington’s Mount Vernon encourages visitors to engage with Washington’s history of enslavement. The “Declaration Book Club,” hosted by Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, explores the history and legacy of the Declaration of Independence without shying away from the centrality of slavery to Jefferson and the nation. Even the center-right American Enterprise Institute’s “We Hold These Truths” initiative thoughtfully engages with the contradiction between the soaring idealism of the founders and their deep involvement in the institution of slavery. 

Our history makes clear that anniversaries do not belong to governments alone. They belong to all of us. No administration, institution, or single group of planners can fully define what the past should mean for the people of the present.