Kevin Young, Dir, NMAAHC placed on leave

Brian Boucher, Smithsonian Museum Director Placed on ‘Indefinite’ Leave Amid Pressure Campaign, Art Net, 2 April 2025

Kevin Young took the reins of the institution in 2021. Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Poet Kevin Young, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) since 2021, has been placed on personal leave indefinitely. The Washington Post broke the story today after obtaining a March 14 email from Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s under secretary for museums and culture. Shanita Brackett, associate director of operations, is now acting director.

Young, poetry editor at the New Yorker, was previously director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is the author of 11 books of poetry. Before signing on at the Schomburg, Young taught for 11 years at Emory University and was curator of its poetry library.

The Smithsonian declined to comment on personnel matters.

The email from Gover came two weeks before President Trump’s March 28 Executive Order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, that targets funding for museums and programs at the Smithsonian Institution that he deems have “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The NMAAHC’s consideration of slavery, Jim Crow, ongoing discrimination against Black people, and other difficult subjects doubtless brought the institution into the new administration’s crosshairs.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo: Alan Karchmer, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

In a letter addressed to its staff following the order, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch reiterated the institution’s commitment to “telling the multi-faceted stories of this country’s extraordinary heritage,” while working with its Board of Regents, which includes Vice President J.D. Vance. Bunch was the founding director of NMAAHC before being named secretary in 2019.

The museum came under fire from Trump and other prominent conservative figures in 2020 for commentary on its “Talking About Race” portal, which, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, marshaled more than 100 multimedia tools, including videos, scholarly articles, and exercises to help educators, parents, and others develop the language to have productive conversations about “one of the nation’s most challenging topics,” according to a press release.

That portal, the Post reported at the time, identified qualities of “white dominant culture, or whiteness” that included traits such as “win at all costs,” “woman’s beauty based on blonde, thin — ‘Barbie’” and “heavy value on ownership of goods, space and property.” These were removed after meeting with protest. Curiously, Trump’s March 28 executive order took issue with the NMAAHC in particular for suggesting that other, presumably favorable, qualities, such as “‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’”