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It wasn’ t crude vandalism. It was surgery. The documents weren’ t being destroyed— which would have caused a scandal. They were just being made... inaccessible. Hard to find. Out of reach. That night, Sarah cried for the first time since her father’ s death. The next day, she began making clandestine copies. The shrinking textbooks Marcus Chen taught history at a high school in Virginia. In September 2027, he received the new history textbooks. While preparing his lesson on World War II, he discovered that the Tuskegee Airmen— the Black pilots who had escorted Allied bombers without ever losing a single one— were given three lines. Three lines in a forty-page chapter. He frantically leafed through the textbook. The Buffalo Soldiers? A footnote. The civil rights movement? Reduced to a paragraph presenting Martin Luther King as a“ controversial” figure. He compared it to the old textbook. Twenty pages had disappeared. Twenty pages of contributions, sacrifices, bloodshed.“ They didn’ t censor them,” he whispered to his wife that evening.“ They did worse. They made them insignificant.”
Museums that are closing
The National Museum of African American Military History in Fort Benning, Georgia, told a story that America had taken a century to accept: Black people had fought in every war in the country, despite segregation, despite contempt, despite everything. In March 2028, the museum received a notification: federal funding suspended. Reason:“ Budget reallocation.” The director, Gloria Johnson, whose grandfather had served with the Buffalo Soldiers, tried to fight back. She wrote to senators, to the media, and launched a fundraising campaign. It wasn’ t enough. The museum closed in June. Gloria stood in front of the closed door on the last day, surrounded by elderly veterans and a few journalists.
Flashmag! Edition 167 Decembre 2025
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