WASHINGTON — When Ronnie Underwood heard President Donald Trump’s claim this week that the Smithsonian Institution is “out of control” and focuses on “how horrible our country is,” he grew angry, he said.

The way Underwood, 65, sees it, if we don’t know our past, how can we learn from it? He’s from Bessemer, Alabama, and grew up during the era of segregation, when Gov. George Wallace, a segregationist, was in power.

“We have to emphasize the past,” he told Capital B. “Young people need to understand their history.”

Underwood had just finished touring the National Museum of African American History and Culture with his friend, Melvin Forbes, 73. It was their first time at the museum, nicknamed the “Blacksonian.” They’re among the many Black tourists who have felt drawn to it in recent days, as the administration threatens to sanitize history and continues its takeover of the nation’s heavily Black capital that Trump has said is filled with “savagery, filth, and scum.”

On Aug. 11, Trump announced that he was deploying around 800 members of the National Guard and 500 federal law enforcement agents to Washington. He reportedly wants to crack down on crime in the city, where violent crime is at a 30-year-low, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department. On Monday, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee joined three other Republican-led states — Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia — and agreed to deploy National Guard troops to Washington.

It was the next day that Trump turned his attention to the Smithsonian. In a move that seemed to escalate his campaign against Washington, he alleged on his social media platform that “everything discussed” at these “WOKE” museums is about “how bad slavery was.”

He added that his team will conduct a review of the museums — a move that has sparked frustration among visitors who don’t want history removed from a sprawling institution meant to educate the public.

“Nothing is more important than Black history, since we created everything. Nobody outworks us. Nobody outthinks us. We influence everything,” Forbes, who grew up in Snow Hill, North Carolina, told Capital B. “What we’re seeing right now is an attempt to erase the truth. If it happened, how can we not talk about it?”

He was among the first Black students to integrate his high school — Greene Central High School — in the mid-1960s, he said. And part of why Trump’s effort to downplay Black history is so disheartening to him is that he had hoped that these kinds of struggles for visibility and fairness had been settled and left in the 20th century.

“My generation truly believed that the sacrifices we made would lead to unprecedented equality,” Forbes said. “So to witness all that’s happening [in Washington] at the moment, it’s just disappointing.”

He added that, if Trump cared about keeping Black communities safe, he would’ve sent resources to these parts of Washington. Instead, National Guard troops have roamed largely around the National Mall, monuments, and other touristy areas. More than 30 guardsmen were seen passing by the entrance of the Blacksonian within the span of a few minutes.

This kind of troop mobilization is typically used for crowd control, not for everyday crime, Omar Wasow, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Capital B last week.

“We need to see all of it”

Margaret Minto agreed with Forbes.

She drove more than five hours from Connecticut with her twin 14-year-old daughters, who were celebrating their birthday, just to tour the Blacksonian. The history it teaches, she told Capital B, is invaluable.

“This information is just so important,” said Minto, who was visiting the museum for the first time and was floored by its focus on a combination of history and culture. “The reason I brought the kids here now, at this moment, is that I’m afraid that Trump will erase it. That’s the reason we drove all the way here.”

She’s been to Washington before, but the mood these days, she explained, is different — it’s much more sobering.

Trump claimed in his social media post that the Smithsonian obsesses over how “unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” and has “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.” But Minto couldn’t disagree more, she said: Though the Blacksonian charts an often brutal chronological history of the U.S. beginning with slavery, it also offers visitors a number of galleries that underscore fun, uplift, and promise.

“We need to see all of it,” Minto said. “The pain and the joy.”

Trump has suggested that he wants to target the Smithsonian’s federal funding, as he’s done with several elite universities. The Smithsonian has a unique status.

The Smithsonian is approximately 62% federally funded, and the rest comes from a variety of other sources, including donations, endowments, and trust funds. Additionally, it isn’t an executive branch agency; a 17-member board of regents governs it.

In March, Trump signed an executive order accusing the Smithsonian of being “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and advancing “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The order empowers Vice President JD Vance to review Smithsonian programs and centers and get rid of what he calls “improper ideology from such properties.”

During his first term, Trump sang the Blacksonian’s praises.

“I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage, especially when it comes to faith, culture, and the unbreakable American spirit,” Trump said in 2017. “I know President [Barack] Obama was here for the museum’s opening last fall. And I’m honored to be the second sitting president to visit this great museum.”

In this uncertain political environment, Underwood said that he can only hope that the Blacksonian and sites like it survive, and that future generations have the opportunity to understand where the country has been — and where it must go.

“People died for what we have today,” he said. “I would just hate for young people not to know about their own past, and to take these sacrifices for granted.”