Trump's DEI assault leaves Boston's Black cultural institutions in peril

Boston Globe

24-06-2025

Now 'we're cooking with hot grease,' she recalled thinking. Trent embarked on a plan to hire new staff and expand its field trips program, a sure way to increase revenue and elevate the museum's profile.
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But then the rug was pulled out. Amid the new Trump administration's frenzy of culture-altering cuts, a letter arrived this spring from the grant's provider, the US Institute of Museum and Library Services. The award was cancelled, the letter said, in part because it 'no longer serves the interest of the United States.' Now, Trent said, the museum's future is uncertain, including an outside chance it will have to close.
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The Museum of African American History had a $500,000 federal grant canceled.
Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe
Similar cuts at cultural institutions across the country have wrought damage far and wide. But the Trump administration's drive to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and,
seemingly, to quash all efforts to illuminate Black experience,
have hit Black cultural groups especially hard.
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'It has been an attack since January on this field,' said Vedet Coleman-Robinson, head of the Association of African American Museums, adding that corporate bookings and overall visitor numbers have fallen since Trump mounted his sustained assault on DEI efforts.
'While we have stamina, and while we are tenacious, I think that everybody is just trying to get to the next day.'
For many, it is a moment of profound cultural whiplash. Black groups that saw a surge in interest in their work after the murder of George Floyd must now contend with the Trump administration's assertion
that their elevation of Black culture is racist. And while other organizations can now simply soft-peddle, or even table, DEI initiatives, Black cultural groups are often mission-driven to present Black narratives of nuance and complexity.
'There's a target on my back,' said Trent, whose museum has campuses in Boston and Nantucket. 'We're all trying to figure out how to survive.'
The effects are being felt well beyond the world of museums. Front Porch Arts Collective, a Black-led theater company in Boston, and Castle of our Skins, a Black musical arts group, were among a small cohort of up-and-coming New England cultural groups that recently lost sizable awards
from a National Endowment for the Arts pilot program meant to support groups that had shown a '
Led by co-producing artistic directors Maurice Emmanuel Parent and Dawn M. Simmons, Front Porch has thrived in recent years. The theater troupe, which regularly works with more established companies to co-produce shows about the African diaspora, has sextupled its operating budget and now has seven employees, three of them full-time.
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Dawn M. Simmons and Maurice Emmanuel Parent, co-producing artistic directors at Front Porch Arts Collective, had funding terminated by the NEA.
Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff
The $130,000 NEA grant was going to help them create a permanent home in Roxbury, fund salaries, and offer free community and education programs.
Boston-based Castle of our Skins has made similar strides. The group, which collaborates with artists and organizations to present African diasporic music, garnered two NEA grants last year totaling $140,000. Then, in December, the group
secured its own performance and events space to be built in the Lower Roxbury/South End neighborhood.
Castle of our Skins co-founder and artistic director Ashleigh Gordon compared the last year to the 1980s-era video game 'Paperboy.'
'The whole point is that you're supposed to deliver the paper to someone's doorstep, and there's like a car, and a lawnmower, and a snake, and all these things sort of jumping out,' she said. 'We just want to build our organization, and then there's these things being thrown at us, which present their own Pandora's box of stresses.'
Simmons (center) and Parent (foreground) at a rehearsal last year for 'A Strange Loop."
Nile Scott Studios
Front Porch's Parent said he began to worry their NEA funds might be in jeopardy after president Trump won the November election.
'I just kind of saw the writing on the wall,' said Parent, who like other grant recipients in the NEA pilot program
received half the funds up front. He
noted that part of the company's mission is 'to advance racial equity through theater.' 'Look at the population of people that run the organizations receiving these grants and the populations being served.'
The Institute of Museum and Library Services grant cancellations
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For Trent, whose Museum of African American History had already received a portion of the canceled grant, that includes whether schools will come for field trips at all.
'Is visiting us now a high risk activity?' she asked. 'Is there potential, given the circumstances, for a school to lose federal support?'
Black leaders said they've also been frustrated by the Trump administration's stated position that DEI efforts are discriminatory.
'We are a Black theater company, but we have never said we're only for Black people,' said Parent. 'Having knowledge of our community makes our entire Commonwealth better, just like having knowledge of all communities makes us all better.'
Simmons, who will become
'Somebody who's telling predominantly white stories wants us to come, wants us to see all of those stories,' she said. 'They think that there is a place for us there. Why would the reverse not be true?'
Meanwhile, Parent, like many nonprofit leaders, has been watching closely Harvard University's showdown with president Trump, who's floated the idea of stripping the school's nonprofit status.
'Take nonprofit status away from organizations, and we would all fold,' he said. 'People get tax breaks for giving to us. If that goes away, we don't have enough revenue to keep going.'
But Castle of our Skins executive director Ciyadh Wells said her organization will remain 'steadfast in our mission.'
'Our organization has been threatened, but we are going to continue,' said Wells, whose organization lost a total of $80,000 in canceled grants.
'If anything, it makes us double down.'
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Castle of our Skins honors Fredrick Douglass with a performance at the Museum of African American History.
Heather Diehl for the Boston Glo
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Gordon and other Castle of our Skins
musicians performed for a small crowd at the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill. The program -- which included works by Black composers interspersed with excerpts from Frederick Douglass's speech 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" -- was at once celebratory and defiant.
It was just the sort of program the museum's founder, Sue Bailey Thurman,
likely envisioned when she founded the
museum nearly 60 years ago.
'This whole idea starts from a woman who arrives in 1953 and thinks that Black history in Boston should be marked and preserved,' Trent had said while seated in the Meeting House a few days earlier. 'You don't want to be the leader who had to close it down.'
Ashleigh Gordan, viola player for Castle of our Skins, honored Fredrick Douglass with a performance at the Museum of African American History.
Heather Diehl for the Boston Glo
Malcolm Gay can be reached at