5 May 2025
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
After a huge outcry in the Black press, the lunch counter exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will remain at what is affectionately called the “Blacksonian.”
The exhibit includes original artifacts from the 1960s Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in where four Black male students from North Carolina A&T who were denied service at Woolworth’s counter and subsequently brutally attacked after sitting at the whites-only counter. The students refused to leave. Their defiance ignited a wave of lunch counter sit-ins across the South and became a major flashpoint in the Civil Rights Movement.
However, as the BlackPressUSA and The Louisiana Weekly noted in the last edition, the owner of the lunch counter as well as other donors were told that the items lent to the museum would be returned, and the exhibits canceled.
Melissa Wood from the Smithsonian‘s Office of Public Affairs said, “Recent reports about the Smithsonian removing the historic Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter and a stool from the National Museum of American History and National Museum of African American History and Culture, respectively, are inaccurate. Both the Greensboro lunch counter and stools where college students sat in protest during the Civil Rights Movement are and continue to be on display. A stool from the sit-ins remains on view at the National Museum of African American History and Culture as the centerpiece of an interactive exhibition. The larger section of the Greensboro counter also remains on display at the National Museum of American History. Suggestions that the Smithsonian had planned or intended to remove these items are false.”
Nevertheless, the lunch counter stands as just one of the items which the Smithsonian promised to return in emails to their donors over the last month. Silence on the other proposed returned items led donor Dr. Amos C. Brown to express skepticism at the museum’s ideological direction, the political climate under Donald Trump and the role of the Black church in defending historical truth.
Dr. Brown, president emeritus of the San Francisco NAACP and longtime civil rights leader, told BlackPressUSA that the museum recently notified him that two of his artifacts – a Bible he carried during the movement and a copy of the Rev. George Washington Williams’s earliest written history of Black people in America – would be returned. He said the staff cited the items’ fragility after years on display. “They claimed the light had been on the books too long,” Dr. Brown said. “It’s a museum – they know how to preserve artifacts. This was disrespectful to our history.”
Dr. Brown said the museum had previously asked to keep the items permanently.
“Now, all of a sudden, you can have it back,” he said. “There was no conversation. Just an email.” He tied the museum’s actions to the Trump administration and its public plan to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. “This is a direct result of Project 2025,” he said. “We didn’t read it. We didn’t take it seriously. Now they’re doing exactly what they said they would do.” When asked if others have received similar notices from the museum, Dr. Brown said he couldn’t confirm specific cases but said sources told him the staff is acting as if they are “tiptoeing on eggshells.”
He said the environment inside the museum has shifted dramatically since previous leadership. Dr. Brown identified the staffer who contacted him by first name only and said the museum officials’ response was vague. “They’re talking about some panel that will review whether to keep the items, but I don’t know who’s on this panel,” he said. “Anytime people are in closed-door sessions, and you don’t know who’s making decisions, something’s wrong.”
Brown confirmed he has had no recent contact with Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch.
“Not once,” Dr. Brown said, pointing to Donald Trump’s threats to defund the museum and a broader campaign to ban books and whitewash history. “There is a move in this country to induce cultural and historical Alzheimer’s,” he said. “This nation has been fed conspiracy theories, lies, and a hatred of truth.”
He warned against division and urged churches to teach Black history regularly. “As the Jews do with Passover, we need rituals of remembrance,” he said. “We should be teaching our youth what we’ve survived.”
This article originally published in the May 5, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.