A nonprofit named for the first black female Episcopal Church priest has announced that it has lost a multi-year grant from the federal government worth approximately $330,000.
The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, a progressive nonprofit based in Durham, North Carolina, named after the first black female ordained by the Episcopal Church, was the recipient of a grant authorized last year from the Institute for Museum and Library Services Museum Grants for African American History and Culture program.
A spokesperson directed The Christian Post to a statement from earlier this month stating that the organization was informed the grant was terminated.
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The grant supported a staff position, the creation of exhibitions, educational curriculum and other programs, according to the nonprofit.
“It is clear that the federal government is making a targeted, intentional effort to erase the histories and contributions of Black people, queer people, women, and other marginalized groups from the historical record,” said Pauli Murray Center Executive Director Angela Thorpe Mason.
“These attacks are confirmation that our work to tell the truth and offer complex and rich stories that spark folks to engage in contemporary social justice work, is valuable, impactful, and necessary.”
The grant termination notice cited President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14238, titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.”
Signed in March, EO 14238 stipulates that “the non-statutory components and functions” of specific “governmental entities,” among them the Institute for Museum and Library Services, “shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
“[T]he Director of the Office of Management and Budget or the head of any executive department or agency charged with reviewing grant requests by such entities shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law and except insofar as necessary to effectuate an expected termination, reject funding requests for such governmental entities to the extent they are inconsistent with this order,” continued EO 14238.
According to the center, the funding was part of over $7.2 million awarded to North Carolina institutions, which included funding to uplift “African American history, art, and culture” and support “public history, public education, organizational capacity building, and economic development via cultural heritage tourism.”
This is not the first time the Pauli Murray Center and the federal government have been at odds. The nonprofit recently accused the National Park Service of erasing Murray’s biography from their website and omitting references to her LGBT identification elsewhere.
In a March statement, the center said that the federal government disabled “at least one webpage, and scrubbed language related to Murray’s transgender and queer identities on others, on the National Park Service (NPS) website.”
While the center’s statement doesn’t clarify from which webpages language was altered, the NPS page for the Pauli Murray Family Home states that Murray “struggled with her sexual identity and sexual orientation” and “later found loving same-sex relationships foundational to her life.” The NPS page on the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham also states that she “struggled with their gender and scholars have suggested they identified as transgender.”
An NPS spokesperson told CP at the time that the agency was implementing two orders on the issue of gender ideology, one being Trump’s “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order, which officially declares that there are only two sexes.
“Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages,” noted one provision of the order.
“Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.”
