As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the question of who gets to tell America’s story is becoming impossible to ignore. This week, Alabama Values joined a national online news briefing hosted by American Community Media to unpack what many communities are experiencing in real time: a coordinated effort to narrow, sanitize, and re-center a version of America that treats nonwhite histories as optional, inconvenient, or disposable.
Moderated by Sandy Close, the briefing centered the rising pressure being applied to museums, national monuments, public institutions, and school curricula, including efforts to cancel exhibits, rename public sites, and restrict what can be taught under the banner of “neutrality” and “patriotism.” The throughline was clear. Control over history has always been a tool of power. What feels different in this moment is the speed and urgency of the effort, especially as demographic shifts, cultural change, and grassroots organizing make it harder to maintain the fiction of an uncontested American past.
Key takeaways from the briefing
Ann Burroughs, President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum and Board Chair of Amnesty International, opened with a powerful reminder that ethnic museums and ethnic media do the same kind of work. They resist erasure, hold memory, and insist on truth. Burroughs underscored that anniversaries are not neutral. They shape what is taught, what is funded, and who future generations come to believe belongs in this nation and on what terms. She also named a reality too many institutions avoid. When civic space shrinks, truth is often one of the first casualties. In response, she called for documentation as a daily practice, not an occasional act, because the record we build now becomes the history future generations will inherit.
Margaret Huang, Senior Fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former President and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, traced how false narratives get cemented into public space through memorials, naming, and public symbols, often long after the events they claim to commemorate. She pointed to the spread of Confederate memorialization as a deliberate project tied to the defense of white supremacy, particularly during the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. She also lifted up what it looks like when communities counter false narratives by building their own institutions of memory, including grassroots public history projects that name harm while also linking it to the present.
Veteran journalist Ray Suarez, author of We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century, named the current push as a power play rooted in grievance and fear. He challenged the fiction that America’s history is a single story centered on one kind of person, arguing that the United States has always been multicultural, shaped by migration, empire, struggle, and organizing across generations. His point was not simply historical. It was present tense. When government uses its influence to impose a fantasy narrative, it is not about education. It is about control.
Alabama Values’ perspective: narrative governance and meaning making
During the briefing, Alabama Values Executive Director Anneshia Hardy offered a Southern lens on what is at stake and why this moment cannot be treated as a messaging debate. Across the country, efforts to restrict history are often framed as common sense or patriotism. In practice, they operate as narrative governance. They are attempts to control historical meaning in order to shape political possibility.
Hardy underscored that narrative erasure is not merely cultural disagreement. It is structural. When communities are pushed out of the nation’s official memory, it becomes easier to push them out of the nation’s protections, out of resources, and out of the political imagination altogether.
This is not theoretical in Alabama. As Hardy noted during the briefing, there is not a single state-funded museum dedicated to documenting the full history of slavery in Alabama. That absence is not accidental. It reflects a long-standing refusal to publicly reckon with how wealth, power, and political authority were built.
Hardy also named the emotional reality communities are carrying. People are not only struggling with facts. They are struggling with meaning. In a climate of escalating anti-immigrant attacks, censorship, state violence, the normalization of white nationalism, and persistent anti-Blackness, communities are asking deeper questions about belonging, power, and whether democracy has room for them at all.
That is why Alabama Values grounds its work in meaning making. Meaning making helps communities connect the past to the present, interpret how power is operating now, and build the clarity needed to act.
Hardy closed with a hard truth that echoes across Southern history. Progress in this country has never been automatic. Every expansion of freedom exists because people forced the nation to move, often against its will. When that pressure stops, the nation does not stand still. It slides backward. Collaboration across movements, generations, and communities is not optional, especially when authoritarian projects do not pause.
Why this briefing matters now
This conversation was the first in an ongoing American Community Media briefing series on who gets to tell the history of America. It is also a model of what responsible media leadership looks like in moments of institutional retreat. When national institutions shrink from historical truth, community and ethnic media, and grassroots communications organizations like Alabama Values, often become the place where memory is held and protected. These outlets do more than report headlines. They document everyday life, they preserve truth, and they carry forward stories that would otherwise be buried.
As we approach the 250th anniversary, America will tell a story about itself. The question is whether that story will be expansive enough to hold truth, conflict, and accountability, or whether it will retreat into myth making that demands silence from the very communities who have made democracy possible.
Watch and share: A recording of the briefing and additional materials will be available through American Community Media. Alabama Values will continue lifting key excerpts and takeaways because this moment demands public clarity, not curated amnesia.
