Trump Wants to Erase Black History. These Digital Archivists Are Racing to Save It

Earlier this week, at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta, a couple dozen fellows commenced a year-long project designed to put the mission of preserving Black history back in the hands of community members.

“We want to open up a conversation asking, ‘What does it look like for a community of Black people to come together and decide what to collect?’” says Makiba Foster, cofounder of the Web Archiving School (WARC), a new training program that teaches practitioners methods of digital preservation built around an “ethic of care.”

“We don’t want to depend on institutions for folks to have these kinds of skills. They will backtrack on us when it’s beneficial to them.”

WARC could not have arrived at a more urgent moment. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) aggressively and vowed to fight “anti-white” racism. He first signed an executive order to end “radical and wasteful” diverse hiring practices in federal agencies, then followed that with another aimed squarely at DEI programs in the private sector. But it didn’t stop there. In March, Trump signed an executive order accusing the Smithsonian Institution of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” Taken together, the proclamations are part of the administration’s broader attempt to sanitize so-called “woke ideology” from the annals of American life and “forge a society that is color-blind and merit based.” But not everyone views it that way.

“There is an attempt at dehumanization happening,” Bergis Jules, an archivist and WARC cofounder says. “The first act of taking away someone’s humanity is denying the fact that you have a history. And if you’re trying to take that away, then you don’t believe those people need to exist.”

WARC’s inaugural class—22 fellows whose backgrounds span everything from research and library science to visual and audio art—are training to become the next generation of Black “memory workers” with the right tools to digitally preserve the histories that are important to them. As many agencies, public and private, have quickly fallen in line with Trump’s orders, Foster says she’s not going to rely on legacy institutions to do that important work.

“When it’s time to make a statement around DEI, and it’s a bandwagon thing, it’s cool. But when the rubber meets the road and someone’s telling you can’t do this, people quickly turn,” she says.

WARC is the flagship program of the Archiving the Black Web collective that Foster and Jules started in 2019, inspired in part by their work documenting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Their efforts come as scholars are sounding the alarm over Trump’s latest war on museums—and history itself. “In this naive effort to control how the past is recorded and interpreted, the Trump administration has stepped into a minefield,” David Blight, president of the Organization of American Historians, wrote in The New York Times.

In March, a biography about baseball hall-of-famer Jackie Robinson was removed from the Nimitz Library in the US Naval Academy, along with 400 books tied to DEI. The following month, the National Park Service removed references to Harriet Tubman’s role in fighting against enslavement on a webpage; that information has since been restored. In the executive order targeting the Smithsonian network of museums, Trump calls out, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit at the American Art Museum, as part of a so-called coordinated effort to “portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Meredith D. Clark, a professor of race and political communication at UNC-Chapel Hill, tells WIRED that museums are akin to “public trusts,” and the Trump administration’s assault on them is an attempt to dictate who does and doesn’t belong.

“One of the things that power needs to do in order to expand and conquer is to convince people that there is no hope in resistance. And a tool for doing that is to destroy heritage,” says Clark, who wrote We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives. “You can see those patterns everywhere, from the Holocaust and the burning of books to, in more recent years, the destruction of historical reservoirs and artifacts in Syria.”

Even though they can be a cesspool of racism and bigotry, social media platforms, from X to TikTok, are now de facto outlets for resistance as digital media has become the primary mode of communication. As facts get easier to manipulate thanks to AI and lack of moderation, information—and our access to it—becomes even more vital. One way online activists and educators have traditionally fought back is through the creation of crowdsourced syllabi recommending resources around issues of police abuse, white supremacy, and race for educators.

“We saw it with Ferguson and Charlottesville,” Clark says of the Twitter campaigns from 2014, following the killing of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown by police, and 2017, in the wake of the Unite the Right rally where violent protests broke out and a white supremacist murdered a woman with his car.

Foster says the country underwent a “pedagogical shift” during this time.

“Black people were saying that ignorance is no longer a defense. Folks were publishing reading lists, opening up their syllabi. All of a sudden you could educate yourself on these issues, and I wanted to document that,” Foster says. “When it comes to preserving an official record, they typically don’t care what we think,” she says of large, often federally backed institutions, which is why social media has become crucial.

The National Libraries and the Internet Archive were, for a time, the principal institutions dedicated to cataloging the web. But “only a small set of people were involved in that community,” Jules says, “and Black folks studying to be archivists were not invited to those networks.”

A nonprofit that launched in 1996, the Internet Archive operates as a library of sorts: It includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, in addition to other artifacts. Many people today think of it as the web’s collective memory. In April, the Internet Archive, which was already facing legal troubles in separate cases from Universal Music Group and the book publisher Hachette, was targeted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency when the agency cut funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supports the archive.

In spite of the administration’s purge, Rudy Fraser, the creator of Blacksky, says he is “heartened by preservation efforts” he’s seen so far, including from Harvard Law Library’s Innovation Lab—which is rescuing federal datasets—and companies such as Joy Media, which leverage AI and VR/AR to scan and annotate African artifacts, making them accessible to people on the continent who otherwise can’t view them.

In 2023, Fraser launched Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service that quickly turned into the central meeting ground for many Black users on Bluesky. He tells me he also views Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years (excluding deletions and moderation removals). “Because the AT Protocol is public and Blacksky’s implementation is open source, anyone with the technical chops could reconstruct the dataset—minus moderation actions—even if our primary databases disappeared,” he says. “Open source, decentralized tooling ensures that, if any single company becomes a nation-state target, the communities that rely on its infrastructure can keep operating.”

Preservation efforts have also taken the form of rogue civil rights courses across college campuses. When Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah’s course on race, media and global history was discontinued by Columbia University in April, Attiah decided to “liberate my teaching work” by hosting it as an online course, aptly rebranding it “Resistance Summer School.”

“This is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism and fear,” she wrote on her Substack. The outpouring of support was seismic. According to Attiah, within 48 hours, all 500 seats were filled; the waiting list currently has over 3,000 people on it.

It is still too soon to say just how much of a long-term impact Trump’s attack on Black history is going to have on our population’s historical literacy, but Foster and Jules say they are not deterred by the work ahead of them.

“What does it mean for the federal government, at this moment, to be stewards of Black people’s history? It only takes the stroke of a pen to start dismantling things. So what does that mean looking forward?” Jules says.

Ultimately, road maps to a better future are impossible without grassroots preservation efforts, Clark says. “The destruction of those histories and records makes it harder for people to remember what that progress looked like. Both its successes and its failures. And it makes it harder for people to imagine what continued progress could look like. That is the whole point.”