In April, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities received a letter terminating our funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It stated that NEH was “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
We now know what that agenda entails: diverting funds away from state humanities councils to help pay for the National Garden of American Heroes, a monumental statue park President Trump first proposed in 2020.
The executive order authorizing the Garden states it will memorialize “heroes who deserve honor, recognition, and lasting tribute.” But we ask, why redirect funding from humanities councils that were already honoring American heroes, in ways that were more accessible and community-oriented?
Some examples from our state:
With NJCH support, the Newark History Society recently held a series of events celebrating Cudjo Banquante, an enslaved man who fought in the Revolutionary War and became Newark’s first documented Black businessman. Events included exhibits, film screenings, concerts, an academic symposium, genealogical workshops and free bus tours, all aiming to root Banquante’s story in his own community and make it highly accessible to its members.
Other NJCH-supported efforts have honored T. Thomas Fortune, who was born into slavery and went on to become a leading Black journalist and civil rights activist. Our funding helped transform his former home into a center for research and education about his life and the history of the Black press. The community-oriented center includes both permanent and rotating exhibits, film screenings, school tours, and professional development experiences for educators and young people.
In Princeton, multiple NJCH grants have helped establish the Bayard Rustin Queer History Archive, the first comprehensive effort to preserve the papers and ephemera of the civil rights leader who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The archive, which includes an open exhibit of physical artifacts, an extensive digital repository of documents and a video library containing the reflections of individuals who knew and worked with Rustin, is designed to be easily accessible to the public and to academic researchers.
Our 2024 partnership with Mississippi Humanities brought local and national recognition to the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer, a child of the Magnolia State and icon of the Civil Rights Movement, made a lasting mark on American history with her heroic testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
That partnership included a series of free public programs, the unveiling of a historical marker on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and a discussion with veterans of that momentous occasion in commemoration of its 60th anniversary.
Multiple NJCH grants have supported the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls. This funding has helped add rich layers of understanding to the life story of the WWII veteran and baseball icon, as well as supporting interactive exhibits exploring history, culture, science and society within the context of the Great American Pastime.
Walt Whitman, sometimes referred to as “The Bard of Camden,” spent the last years of his life in that New Jersey city, where NJCH’s small mobile office building is located. The Civil War nurse and prolific poet is one of the most-studied figures in American literature. Our efforts have sought to bring his life “off the page,” including conferences devoted to understanding his place within multiple American cultures and numerous living history appearances by interpreters at libraries, nonprofit organizations and community centers.
Certainly, the Garden State is proud that Whitman was included alongside many other New Jerseyans in the initial list of planned National Garden honorees.
But we question the value of uprooting funding for vibrant, community-oriented efforts that honor these individuals within the very places that shaped them in favor of efforts to “fix in the soil of a single place” steely statues of them, location TBD.
President Trump’s plan will work against his stated goal to honor American heroes, by decreasing the number of such stories told, making them harder to access and removing from them a fuller context of history.
Statues alone, especially in a remote location (South Dakota has been floated), offer little access or engagement for the communities that most need to see themselves in our national story.
Exploring a historic person, event or time period typically does not cement our understanding of the subject into a single narrative. Rather, doing so expands the possibilities for further discussion. One perspective doesn’t cancel out another, and nuanced understandings, even contradicting views, can and should exist when we appreciate context. Providing that complex context is the work of the humanities.
The same principle should apply to how we fund historical work. Investing in new monuments shouldn’t come at the cost of cancelling programs that bring history to life within communities.
Carin Berkowitz, Ph.D., is executive director of the NJ Council for the Humanities.
