The Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Museum in Chesapeake is one local organization feeling the immediate impact of President Donald Trump's administration’s decision to cut staff and funding at the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The agency provided local museums with grants to support new programs. According to its grant database, it’s given $5 million to organizations in Hampton Roads in the last decade and closer to $15 million in the region since 1997.
The Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Museum received $31,000 in 2023 for a two-year docent training program.
Docents learned costumed interpretations, interpretative techniques and successful ways to handle what museum leaders called “difficult topics and situations” in a grant description.
The Museum’s Foundation says the trainings are almost done. Reimbursement was approved but never sent.
“As a small American history museum, we are in the company of so many across the nation whose stories are relevant, inclusive and inspiring – and whose budgets are small and stretched,” the foundation wrote in a statement.
The Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Museum details the Revolutionary War Battle of Great Bridge and the role Chesapeake waterways played in the war. It opened in 2020.
"It's an American history museum ... and we pride ourselves in telling the complete history, the whole story," said Jean Carideo, chair of the museum's foundation. "There are lots of perspectives, there are lots of different people involved. There are a lot of competing ideas of freedom involved in this period, as in any other American period."
The museum, for example, has an exhibit that allows visitors to see Great Bridge in the Revolutionary War era from the perspective of an enslaved person, indigenous person, British soldier or Patriot. That was paid for with a grant unrelated to the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant program.
"If you want to hear about a little girl that has been enslaved and has to run away and hide in the Dismal Swamp for the rest of her life, we have that story," Carideo said. "If you want to hear (from) a British soldier who is doing exactly what he's supposed to do and yet is getting shot at, we tell that story. If you want to hear about a patriot who can't take the British telling them what to do or controlling their lives anymore, you hear that story. You hear them all."
"Repurposing its funding"
The Trump administration put most Institute of Museum and Library Services staff on administrative leave at the end of March. Museums and other humanities organizations around the country began receiving grant termination letters last week.
The Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Museum’s termination letter, which they provided to WHRO, is dated April 8. It references Trump’s Executive Order 14238, which eliminated non-statutory functions of several agencies, including the IMLS, Minority Business Development Agency and U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
IMLS Acting Director Keith Sonderling referenced the order in the letter to the Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Museum, in addition to saying the grant for the docent training was “no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program,” and “IMLS is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
Almost two dozen states sued the administration after IMLS staff went on leave. Virginia and North Carolina are not among those states.
Leaders at the Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Museum wrote in a statement they are committed to the original mission statement of the IMLS to “inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement.”
“Manipulating or silencing museums that invite people to think and recognize the humanity in themselves and those who came before them takes away their opportunities to feel empathy, celebrate past successes, recognize past wrongs and commit to doing better by their fellow citizens and their country in the future,” museum leaders wrote.
