When Katelynd Anderson reflects on the impact of the Anacostia Community Museum, she thinks of the story of Vivian Williams. As a resident of the Arthur Capper public housing project in Capitol Hill, Williams dedicated much of her life to public advocacy and drawing attention to the food access disparities affecting African American neighborhoods in Washington, DC.

When the Anacostia Community Museum unveiled its “Food for the People: Eat & Activism in Greater Washington” exhibit in 2022, Williams—then 95—brought three generations of her family to witness it.

“I still enjoy talking about that,” said Anderson, interim director of Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum, in an interview with NPQ. “It’s why we come to work every day. We have these powerful stories of everyday people making change.”

Museums offer a transformative opportunity: to document, shape, and reshape our knowledge of our own history. But who writes that history?

Museums and Community Well-Being: To Homogenize or to Affirm?

In March 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order—“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”—aimed at reviewing national museums in order to “restore truth.” As a result, in 2026, a slavery display at Independence Hall was removed.

While the current administration’s attempts to revise museum history displays are novel in character, attempts to revise museum history are by no means new. In an interview with NPQ, Andrea Burns, a professor of history at Appalachian State University, noted that during the Clinton administration attempts were made to revise the exhibit dedicated to the Enola Gay—the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb. The exhibit was scaled back but eventually displayed  at the National Air & Space Museum due to criticism from Smithsonian leadership.

“There’s always been difficulty in telling these stories,” Burns said. “The Enola Gay is probably the closest counterpart or example to what’s happening now.” Yet, Burns points out a key distinction that “the Clinton administration did not directly intervene or demand to see exhibit scripts, plans or other Smithsonian records. By contrast, Executive Order 14253, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ directly interferes with the operations of the Smithsonian in regard to its current and future exhibits.”

Read the full article about museums and community well-being by Gregory P. Perreault at Nonprofit Quarterly.