BS Summary: This article contains 7 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Biased Writer Voice, and False Dilemma, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 7.8% saturation with 84 hits. Analysis detected 256 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,078 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 11.4% and a BS Rank of 2% (21,985 of 22,405 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 98.10% of the article peer group.
When Donald Trump assumed office in 2025, he launched a sweeping attack on the Smithsonian museums with an apparent mission to present a censored version of American culture and history.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” he wrote online.
“We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner,” Trump told the press.
In majority-Black cities like Detroit, Trump’s attack on “woke” culture ignited a wave of cultural preservation at the community level.
Archivists, historians, artists and other culture workers are fighting against what they see as a systematic attempt to erase and censor minority voices.
Their work involves teaching the principles of collecting, retelling and preserving the stories and artifacts of everyday Black life.
These emerging archival efforts often include celebrating ephemera that traditional archives exclude, such as photographs, generational stories and collective social practices.
Detroit’s Black Bottom Archives (BBA) is one of the most engaged local efforts, hosting memory workers’ meetups and oral history workshops to help residents begin archiving the stories of their families, neighborhoods and personal curiosities.
Building a community archive “centered on and created by Black people is an important intervention,” said Marcia Black, archivist, cultural preservationist and the organization’s co-executive director.
“There’s such a long legacy of Black stories being erased, misconstrued and weaponized that there’s so much work that needs to be done for us to undo that, to build something better.”
“The importance of telling your story, even if it’s the same one repeatedly, is that it’s a subtle way of keeping memory and history alive.”
Juniper Jones, multidisciplinary artist in Detroit
Last year, the nonprofit launched the Preserving Black Legacy Fellowship to train a cohort of Black Detroiters in archival, preservation and storytelling techniques.
The group is relying on oral histories and archival research to develop an online, multimedia exhibit.
Fellows will unveil their projects at the Black Bottom | Black Legacy Festival in August.
Narratives are powerful enough to change systems, Black said.
“I’m working to change systems through the lens of: How can I change the culture through filling in the gaps, asking critical questions, defining our narratives for ourselves and getting to decide what is worth remembering?”
Holding memory
For Kelli Morgan, remembering culture has always been personal.
As a youth, Morgan created stories from items she found rummaging through her grandparents’ attic — from Ebony and Jet magazines and old Vernors bottles to her mom and aunt’s toys from the ’40s.
The family archives were her playground.
“With archives, they go into institutions, and it’s possible that we will never see them again,” Morgan said.
“So we have to mine it ourselves.”
Her grandfather’s stories about different artifacts and the Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines he brought home from his days working at the racetrack influenced Morgan.
She is now a museum practitioner and founding executive director and CEO of Black Artists Archive.
“I created Black Artists Archive so we could keep our stuff.”
The organization’s core focus is developing a repository of documentation, personal collections and artifacts chronicling legacies of Black art and cultural producers across the Midwest.
Morgan sees The Black Canon — consisting of over 40,000 collectibles spanning the 1910s and beyond — as an ideal model for the archiving that needs to be prioritized amid Trump’s continuing cultural attacks.
“It was fascinating that families, like Ali Wheeler and Alima Wheeler-Trapp of The Black Canon, had absolutely no interest in giving their collections to public institutions.
In the 1990s, that’s typically what would happen,” Morgan said.
She regards Dr.
Charles H.
Wright’s work and Margaret Burroughs’ DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago as models for how Black people can use their own archives and ultimately create their own systems.
Like Morgan and Black, visual artists see a similar urgency in protecting and preserving Black narratives.
Looking to begin your archiving practice?
Explore these resources:
• Black Bottom Archives resources and learning tools
• Black Artists Archive’s Black Curatorial Institute
• Black Bottom Archives’ Archiving 101
“The importance of telling your story, even if it’s the same one repeatedly ... is that it’s a subtle way of keeping history and collective memory alive,” said Juniper Jones, a Detroit multidisciplinary artist whose portrait series celebrates Black family traditions.
“When our grandmas, aunties and mothers” repeat family stories, “those are very important parts of collective memory” that can’t be taken for granted, they said.
For her graduate thesis exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, Rachel Elise Thomas created a series about the challenges faced by the first Black Americans to attend predominantly white institutions.
Holding a mirror to her own experiences navigating such spaces, the series features historical images accompanied by Thomas’ thumbprint beneath redacted identities of white students to emphasize the isolation.
“We archive to learn from our past, no matter how painful, and to avoid repeating” mistakes, Thomas said.
“I use archival images in my work to call out, to show that things need to change or not much has changed.”
“It’s a responsibility to honor Black stories that I’m telling.”
Just across the street from the Barack Obama Leadership Academy, East Canfield Art Park is home to Detroit sculptor Austen Brantley’s “Boy Holds Flower.”
The bronze cast figure of a young child sitting cross-legged, admiring the flower he’s holding, reflects the innocence of childhood.
“It’s one of my favorite sculptures,” Brantley said.
“There’s not a historical context,” he said of the work, which he made to be “timeless.”
“It’s not Downtown Detroit.
It’s where it really should be, and that’s the community, where they deserve to see something” representing the beauty of Black children.
Brantley’s commitment to history as a muse is on display throughout Detroit.
“I use humans as a vessel to talk about what’s happening in either my history or how I see my story as an artist,” he said.
“A lot of sculptures aren’t just statues — they are stories.”
“It’s one of the most ancient things we have used to tell stories.”
Still, with Black history and culture under ongoing attack, BBA’s Marcia Black hopes more people will see themselves as preservationists.
“There’s an important part of the work of remembering where we come from, but there’s also the part that we’re making history right now,” she said.
“We have a responsibility to pay it forward and make sure that future generations have something to look back to.”
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