The Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York, filed a lawsuit alleging the Trump administration unlawfully terminated its federal grant due to racial discrimination and efforts to dismantle diversity initiatives. The museum claims the cancellation of the $250,000 grant violated the First and Fifth Amendments.
The Underground Railroad Education Center filed a lawsuit Friday demanding that a federal grant be reinstated after it was terminated by the Trump administration.Mary Liz Stewart, co-founder of the Underground Railroad Education Center, shows an architectural model of the museum’s planned Interpretive Center on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, at the Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence on Livingston Ave.
in Albany, N.Y. An Underground Railroad museum in upstate New York alleged in a lawsuit Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated its federal grant on the basis of race, pointing to President Donald Trump's efforts to dismantle diversity-focused initiatives. The Underground Railroad Education Center, located in Albany N.Y., alleges in its lawsuit that the National Endowment for the Humanities' cancelation of a $250,000 grant amounted to viewpoint and racial discrimination, violating the First and Fifth Amendments, respectively.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of New York, calls for the funds to be reinstated.that required federal agencies to eliminate any operations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within 60 days. The 40-page brief outlined 1,400 grants that were terminated in early April 2025"for their conflict with President Trump’s EOs and the new agency priorities adopted in their wake." Nina Loewenstein, a lawyer for the museum, told NBC News that there is"just no legitimate basis" for the grant's cancellation, adding that it is"just explicitly erasing things associated with the Black race." Loewenstein and the team of lawyers volunteering on the case through Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that provides free legal services for civil and human rights cases, argued that the Underground Railroad Education Center is just one of thousands of organizations that have been unlawfully targeted by the Trump administration. "Numerous statements of the current Executive Branch leadership reflect overt and coded racism supporting white supremacy and denigrating Black history in America," the lawsuit said. It added that the administration"systematically targeted grantees and programs that sought to increase the public’s understanding of Black history and cultures."The Trump administration has targeted museums and exhibits across the United States in an effort to enforce the president's anti-DEI directives. A judge ordered the administration last month toan expansive review of the Smithsonian's museum The Underground Railroad Education Center is based in the home of Stephen and Harriet Myers, abolitionists who helped thousands of people escape slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War, according to the museum's co-founders, Paul and Mary Liz Stewart. The Stewarts began working on Underground Railroad research in the late 1990s, after Mary Liz, a fifth-grade teacher at the time, heard from her students that they had almost no awareness on the subject despite the deep ties it had to their neighborhood. Since 2004, the couple has worked to restore the home and turn it into a place at the center of the community, hosting tours and activities. The Stewarts had been working towards funding a $12 million project to construct an interpretive center next to the Myers' residence, as its current operations have outgrown the space. Losing the $250,000 grant from the NEH, they said, caused a major setback for the project. Mary Liz said the grant"validated who we are as an organization, what we were trying to do. And in turn, sort of said to the to the wider world, this is an organization worth paying attention to." We all know about the Underground Railroad —the network that Harriet Tubman and others used to bring enslaved people from the South to the northern free states in the years through the Civil War. But you likely haven’t learned about the alternate route to freedom that ran through Florida and existed with the help of the Black Seminoles. This is the story of the Southern Underground Railroad.
Underground Railroad Lawsuit Trump Administration Discrimination DEI
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