The Institute of Museum and Library Services, for example, has also canceled contracts with the Whitney Plantation, a museum in Louisiana that offers tours focused on the experiences of enslaved people. The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina, lost a $330,800 multiyear federal grant. After losing its federal grants, the Evansville African American Museum in Indiana began charging for some of its programs to keep its door open.
“A lot of these museums were already struggling because usually it’s the places with the bigger names that get the money they need,” Coleman-Robinson said. “So now if you’re in a state that doesn’t necessarily support African American history and culture, all you have left is grassroots fundraising.”
The Amistad Research Center, located on Tulane University’s campus but unaffiliated with the school, was founded in 1966 to hold letters and legal documents related to the 1841 Supreme Court case United States v. The Amistad. The court had ruled in favor of enslaved people who were taken into custody after they mutinied on a ship sailing near Cuba.
The archives have grown to include personal letters from historic Black figures such as author Zora Neale Hurston, activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Edward R. Dudley, the first Black U.S. ambassador to Liberia, as well as other key members of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements.
The collections remain safe in a temperature-controlled environment, said the center’s executive director, Kathe Hambrick. But with fewer staff members, the center isn’t able to accept new material or process all of the research requests it receives from historians, journalists and filmmakers.
On April 9, Hambrick said, she received letters from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent federal agency, canceling four of the center’s grants. The grants were no longer consistent with “the agency’s priorities,” the letters said. Federal grants make up about 40 percent of the center’s $1.5 million annual budget.
The cancellations felt targeted, Hambrick said. “We are a Black history preservation organization with a large LGBTQ collection,” she said. “Don’t you think we would be a target?”
Among the contracts canceled was a $261,202 grant to hire two archivists to catalogue some of the backlog of rare books and assist more researchers. Laura Thomson, the center’s part-time grant manager, said the new positions were essential to keep up with the demand for services. “We have a very busy reference desk,” Thomson said.
In early April, the IMLS, created by Congress in 1996 and charged with supporting America’s libraries and museums, notified hundreds of institutions that it was terminating their grants after President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing officials to wind down the agency’s work with an aim of eventually shuttering it.
The same termination letters went out to nearly every organization receiving IMLS grants, a spokesperson said, adding that those tied to diversity programs weren’t singled out. But the groups were allowed to appeal the termination of their grants, said the spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
About 220 grants were restored, including those aligned with the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of Declaration of Independence, the spokesperson said. “We’re talking about tribes in Alaska that barely have internet service that went through every step that was offered to them to save their grants so they didn’t have to take the painful step of laying people off or limiting services,” they said.
Grants to the Museum of African American History in Boston were restored after it appealed their termination, said museum president Noelle Trent. But it wasn’t a simple process, she said, adding that others struggled to navigate it.
“This whole situation has been about as clear as mud,” said Trent, who used to work at the IMLS reviewing grant applications. “This situation for a lot people was like riding a unicycle and everything’s on fire.”
In May, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction, halting the agency’s closure. The IMLS, which administered $266 million in grants and research funding to cultural institutions last year, was also ordered to restore grants in 21 states where attorneys general sued the administration.
But the process for appealing the termination of the grants has been unclear, and Amistad wasn’t able to apply, according to Thomson. The center’s staff tried to reach agency officials for help but couldn’t reach anyone, she said.
The Amistad center has also halted work on some projects, including granting the public access to 130 hours of interviews that Lichtenstein, the documentary filmmaker, conducted in the early 1990s with residents of Mound Bayou, a Mississippi Delta town that formerly enslaved people founded after emancipation.
In March, Hambrick launched an online fundraiser to raise $1 million.
“Those first 100 days, we were all very confused and concerned,” she said. “I realized at about day 110 that I needed to put out a call to action.”
So far, the center has raised about $30,000 and is reaching out to philanthropic organizations for additional help.
“We were here when there was no federal funding for this kind of work,” Hambrick said. “We’re not going down now. We’re just slowing down, but we’re not going anywhere.”
