President Donald Trump hosted a reception at the White House on Feb. 20, celebrating Black History Month and the role African Americans have played in U.S. commerce and the Revolutionary War.
Trump invited a group of black political figures, activists, and celebrities, including golf legend Tiger Woods, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), ESPN host Sage Steele, former NFL player Jack Brewer, football legend and U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas nominee Herschel Walker, and Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK).
Trump discussed the inclusion of statues honoring black historical figures at his planned National Garden of American Heroes and said this year he was paying “tribute to the generations of black legends, champions, warriors and patriots who helped drive our country forward to greatness.”
“The last administration tried to reduce all of American history to a single year, 1619, but under our administration, we honor the indispensable role black Americans have always played in the immortal cause of another date, 1776,” Trump said, contrasting the year enslaved Africans arrived in the Virginia colony with the year of the Declaration of Independence.
“The theme of this year’s celebration is African Americans and labor, and we want to thank all of the black workers, construction workers, and every other worker. They do a job like nobody can do, and we want to just thank them very much for their contribution,” he added.
Trump said Prince Estabrook, an enslaved African American man who was wounded while fighting at the Battle of Lexington, one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War, would be memorialized with a statue in the National Garden of American Heroes. The president said other statues would feature “capitalist black Americans” and major black historical figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, MLK, Muhammed Ali, and Aretha Franklin.
“It’s going to be a statue park,” Trump said on Thursday. “We’re picking the final sites now, it’s between various states that want it very bad.”
The order calls for the list to be created “as expeditiously as possible” ahead of next year’s celebrations.
Trump on Jan. 31 signed a proclamation recognizing February 2025 as National Black History Month and calling for “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”
Trump’s ceremony comes as his executive order ending the federal government’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs takes effect. The Department of Defense issued guidance that said working hours should no longer be used to celebrate awareness months such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and National Disability Employment Awareness Month.
Some Democrats in Washington have said Trump’s DEI order targets programs that promote racial inclusion, while Republicans have criticized DEI for being racially discriminatory.
CJ Pearson, a national cochair of the Republican National Committee’s youth advisory council, said the president’s policies “aren’t promoting racism, but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King, Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character.”
