Overseer Mellon Foundation Whipping the American People Over Slave Past
June 2025
To set the stage for discussion of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s obsession with slavery, we must hearken-back to radical Marxist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980. A curriculum guide for teachers of middle and high school, to assist in the teaching of Zinn’s book, is The Zinn Education Project, produced in 2008. It is an extensive archive of lesson plans and materials. This Project is coordinated by “Rethinking Schools”,” and “Teaching for Change”. Zinn’s well-documented objective was to bring about a “quiet revolution” in America.
The Zinn Education Project offered assistance with ‘Teaching the New York Times’ 1619 Project,’ written in 2019. The Zinn Education Project currently features a “1619 Project booklet”.
The Project even claims that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. That claim has been refuted by reputable scholars across the political spectrum.
The 1619 Project offers a serious distortion of history. As the hard-Left Southern Poverty Law Center puts it, “Understanding slavery is vital to understanding racial inequality today.”
The connection between the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Zinn’s false history, and the 1619 Project, is the Foundation’s National Monument Audit.
Mellon’s Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit directs students and teachers to the Zinn Education Project’s #TeachTruth syllabus.
Despite the fact that many historians vehemently reject this claim, Mellon believes as Zinn and the writers of the 1619 Project do: “Slavery isn’t just our country’s original sin, but our origin.”
Slavery at Museums, Institutions, and in Higher Education
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seems to have doubled-down in the last five years in its funding for projects on slavery at our Founders’ homes, museums, institutions, and in higher education.
Mellon has been devoted to funding projects at our Founders’ homes that highlight slavery at the expense of the great accomplishments by the Founders themselves.
Mellon awarded $3.5 million to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, in 2023, to expand the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s Getting Word African American Oral History Project. While the intention of the Project is a noble one, a tour of Monticello is presented as merely a slaveholder’s plantation. The house tour focuses mainly on the mansion’s architecture and its contents rather than on Thomas Jefferson and his brilliant political career.
Admittedly, Thomas Jefferson’s lavish lifestyle and poor decision-making meant that “he was unable to follow George Washington’s example and affirm his principles by freeing his slaves. This is a serious moral failing. But while this does represent a side of Jefferson—and a condemnable one—it is not the only side,” according to the Heritage Foundation.
The Mellon Foundation gave $7.5M to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the owner of President James Madison’s home, Montpelier, where the emphasis is not on Madison, the author of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but on slavery.
Montpelier, for example, is devoid of exhibits dedicated to the historic contributions of James Madison. Some of the exhibits on slavery are informative, but others contain distortions and omissions. “One panel on the first 18 presidents and their relationship with slavery notes that some presidents (Jefferson and Madison) never freed their slaves but fails to mention that Washington did, while another indicates that the enslaved population in New Hampshire in 1790 was 11% when the actual figure was 0.11%.”
Tourists are immersed in all things slavery and come away with little knowledge of the Founders and their accomplishments.
Even Frederick Douglass, as painful as it must have been for him to do, conceded that the men who had compromised away his freedom (the Founders) “were great in their day and generation.”
In 2027, The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) and Montpelier Descendant Committee (MDC) will actualize their vision for a memorial to the enslaved, This will be made possible by the generosity of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and a nearly $5.8 million contribution by the Mellon Foundation in 2023.
“TMF and MDC will use the funds to build a memorial to the enslaved “Invisible Founders” of the nation. This monument will expand public understanding of the term “Founders” to include enslaved Americans, whose vast intellectual and skilled contributions supported the birth of the Republic.”
In Virginia's Shockoe Valley – once an epicenter of the American slave trade – stands the Shockoe Institute, a national organization headquartered in Richmond and “dedicated to revealing the enduring impact of racial slavery on our shared American experience.”
The over 12,000 square-foot exhibition and educational facility supporting the ‘evidence-based scholarship’ and ‘immersive storytelling’ is in Richmond’s historic Main Street Station.
“It was the Mellon Foundation’s (2024) grant of $11 million that allows this institute to be the largest privately funded effort dedicated to understanding slavery, the domestic slave trade in Richmond and the struggle to expand human freedom,” Shockoe Institute President and CEO Marland Buckner said.
Richmond Mayor Danny Avula praised both the “unprecedented gift” of the Mellon Foundation grant and the Shockoe Institute for its plans to share the story of slavery in Richmond.
“Now, to see that come together in something like the Shockoe Institute that will be a place that will teach folks, that will engage folks and that will make sure people have the opportunity to wrestle with our history … I couldn’t be prouder to have this in our city,” Avula said.
The Main Street Station interpretive center will serve as a starting point for the project, leading into other components, such as a long-planned 62,000-square-foot slavery museum, burial ground memorials and other commemorative sites, including a 21,000-square-foot building commemorating the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail/Devil’s Half Acre site.
Another museum received gifts from the Mellon Foundation and the Meadows Foundation in Dallas to honor the end of slavery in the U.S. The grants will make it possible for The National Juneteenth Museum’s journey to become the “nation’s premier institution dedicated to preserving and celebrating the legacy of Juneteenth.”
The National Juneteenth Museum will feature exhibits, programs, and events that highlight the history and significance of Juneteenth, recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, and “the broader narrative of African American freedom and achievement.”
“The museum will be a 50,000 square-foot epicenter for education and celebration of Juneteenth, dedicated to fostering opportunities that empower future generations.”
That’s admirable, Mellon, but how is a museum on slavery going to foster opportunities or empower future generations?
The Foundation continues its slavery-centered philanthropy at American colleges and universities.
The University of Maryland’s 1856 Project is part of the “Universities Studying Slavery,” a consortium of over one hundred institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. The Mellon Foundation awarded the Project $200,000 in 2024 to “establish a two-year research incubator program that will investigate the legacy of slavery at the university and document histories of enslaved individuals, ensuring their stories and contributions are recognized, honored and preserved.”
This Project is dedicated to investigating the legacy of slavery at the University of Maryland and “engaging in reparative archives work.” ‘Reparative’ is a left-wing buzzword.
Earlier in 2024, The University of Massachusetts Amherst received its largest grant ever from the Mellon Foundation, $2.65 million over three years, to enhance the “Slavery North Initiative.” The Slavery North Initiative, founded in 2020, “aims to bring public attention to the history, as well as social and cultural impacts of trans-Atlantic slavery” in the U.S. and Canada.
These funds will contribute to a three-person staff, a lecture series, Black History Month panels, an academic conference, an edited academic book, a podcast series, workshops, art and culture exhibitions, and a historical database for primary sources on the study of slavery.
In the academic year of 2023-2024, Brandeis University held a series of scholarly seminars sponsored by the Mellon Foundation: "Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and The Logics of Gender-Based Violence." The premise? How “racialized gender and sexual violence was foundational to settler colonialism and slavery and still permeates present social institutions” in the United States.
Professor Anita Hill, the woman who falsely accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, moderated one of the seminars.
“Today we will understand the relationship between the two, settler colonialism and slavery, and understand it not as two separate institutions or forms of oppression, but as two coexisting and self-supporting forms of oppression,” said (Professor) Hill. “We'll learn that through the lens of gender-based violence.”
(There is no mention of males beating up females in women’s sports nor the persecution of women in Islamic countries.)
Do Brandeis’ topics seem to be of “major scholarly significance?” Perhaps so if the university’s main objective is not to educate but to indoctrinate.
Even the unconscionable idea of reparations for slavery hasn’t escaped the Mellon Foundation.
“Evanston, Illinois, made national headlines in 2019, becoming the first city in the nation to fund reparations for its Black citizens. Although other municipalities have since passed resolutions in support of reparations, Evanston remains the only city in the country to actually distribute funds. A community-based archive called Shorefront Legacy Center—the recipient of a 2020 grant from Mellon—played a key role in bringing the program to life.”
Five million dollars has been disbursed so far to direct descendants and ancestors in the city’s effort to repair harms from discriminatory practices.
In 2024, Judicial Watch filed a class-action lawsuit against Evanston, IL, on behalf of six individuals over the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a reparations program. The suit contends that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Litigation is ongoing at this writing.
The Mellon Foundation’s obsession with slavery is just as glaring as its determination to encourage anti-American activism.
June 2025
To set the stage for discussion of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s obsession with slavery, we must hearken-back to radical Marxist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980. A curriculum guide for teachers of middle and high school, to assist in the teaching of Zinn’s book, is The Zinn Education Project, produced in 2008. It is an extensive archive of lesson plans and materials. This Project is coordinated by “Rethinking Schools”,” and “Teaching for Change”. Zinn’s well-documented objective was to bring about a “quiet revolution” in America.
The Zinn Education Project offered assistance with ‘Teaching the New York Times’ 1619 Project,’ written in 2019. The Zinn Education Project currently features a “1619 Project booklet”.
The Project even claims that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. That claim has been refuted by reputable scholars across the political spectrum.
The 1619 Project offers a serious distortion of history. As the hard-Left Southern Poverty Law Center puts it, “Understanding slavery is vital to understanding racial inequality today.”
The connection between the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Zinn’s false history, and the 1619 Project, is the Foundation’s National Monument Audit.
Mellon’s Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit directs students and teachers to the Zinn Education Project’s #TeachTruth syllabus.
Despite the fact that many historians vehemently reject this claim, Mellon believes as Zinn and the writers of the 1619 Project do: “Slavery isn’t just our country’s original sin, but our origin.”
Slavery at Museums, Institutions, and in Higher Education
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seems to have doubled-down in the last five years in its funding for projects on slavery at our Founders’ homes, museums, institutions, and in higher education.
Mellon has been devoted to funding projects at our Founders’ homes that highlight slavery at the expense of the great accomplishments by the Founders themselves.
Mellon awarded $3.5 million to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, in 2023, to expand the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s Getting Word African American Oral History Project. While the intention of the Project is a noble one, a tour of Monticello is presented as merely a slaveholder’s plantation. The house tour focuses mainly on the mansion’s architecture and its contents rather than on Thomas Jefferson and his brilliant political career.
Admittedly, Thomas Jefferson’s lavish lifestyle and poor decision-making meant that “he was unable to follow George Washington’s example and affirm his principles by freeing his slaves. This is a serious moral failing. But while this does represent a side of Jefferson—and a condemnable one—it is not the only side,” according to the Heritage Foundation.
The Mellon Foundation gave $7.5M to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the owner of President James Madison’s home, Montpelier, where the emphasis is not on Madison, the author of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but on slavery.
Montpelier, for example, is devoid of exhibits dedicated to the historic contributions of James Madison. Some of the exhibits on slavery are informative, but others contain distortions and omissions. “One panel on the first 18 presidents and their relationship with slavery notes that some presidents (Jefferson and Madison) never freed their slaves but fails to mention that Washington did, while another indicates that the enslaved population in New Hampshire in 1790 was 11% when the actual figure was 0.11%.”
Tourists are immersed in all things slavery and come away with little knowledge of the Founders and their accomplishments.
Even Frederick Douglass, as painful as it must have been for him to do, conceded that the men who had compromised away his freedom (the Founders) “were great in their day and generation.”
In 2027, The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) and Montpelier Descendant Committee (MDC) will actualize their vision for a memorial to the enslaved, This will be made possible by the generosity of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and a nearly $5.8 million contribution by the Mellon Foundation in 2023.
“TMF and MDC will use the funds to build a memorial to the enslaved “Invisible Founders” of the nation. This monument will expand public understanding of the term “Founders” to include enslaved Americans, whose vast intellectual and skilled contributions supported the birth of the Republic.”
In Virginia's Shockoe Valley – once an epicenter of the American slave trade – stands the Shockoe Institute, a national organization headquartered in Richmond and “dedicated to revealing the enduring impact of racial slavery on our shared American experience.”
The over 12,000 square-foot exhibition and educational facility supporting the ‘evidence-based scholarship’ and ‘immersive storytelling’ is in Richmond’s historic Main Street Station.
“It was the Mellon Foundation’s (2024) grant of $11 million that allows this institute to be the largest privately funded effort dedicated to understanding slavery, the domestic slave trade in Richmond and the struggle to expand human freedom,” Shockoe Institute President and CEO Marland Buckner said.
Richmond Mayor Danny Avula praised both the “unprecedented gift” of the Mellon Foundation grant and the Shockoe Institute for its plans to share the story of slavery in Richmond.
“Now, to see that come together in something like the Shockoe Institute that will be a place that will teach folks, that will engage folks and that will make sure people have the opportunity to wrestle with our history … I couldn’t be prouder to have this in our city,” Avula said.
The Main Street Station interpretive center will serve as a starting point for the project, leading into other components, such as a long-planned 62,000-square-foot slavery museum, burial ground memorials and other commemorative sites, including a 21,000-square-foot building commemorating the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail/Devil’s Half Acre site.
Another museum received gifts from the Mellon Foundation and the Meadows Foundation in Dallas to honor the end of slavery in the U.S. The grants will make it possible for The National Juneteenth Museum’s journey to become the “nation’s premier institution dedicated to preserving and celebrating the legacy of Juneteenth.”
The National Juneteenth Museum will feature exhibits, programs, and events that highlight the history and significance of Juneteenth, recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, and “the broader narrative of African American freedom and achievement.”
“The museum will be a 50,000 square-foot epicenter for education and celebration of Juneteenth, dedicated to fostering opportunities that empower future generations.”
That’s admirable, Mellon, but how is a museum on slavery going to foster opportunities or empower future generations?
The Foundation continues its slavery-centered philanthropy at American colleges and universities.
The University of Maryland’s 1856 Project is part of the “Universities Studying Slavery,” a consortium of over one hundred institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. The Mellon Foundation awarded the Project $200,000 in 2024 to “establish a two-year research incubator program that will investigate the legacy of slavery at the university and document histories of enslaved individuals, ensuring their stories and contributions are recognized, honored and preserved.”
This Project is dedicated to investigating the legacy of slavery at the University of Maryland and “engaging in reparative archives work.” ‘Reparative’ is a left-wing buzzword.
Earlier in 2024, The University of Massachusetts Amherst received its largest grant ever from the Mellon Foundation, $2.65 million over three years, to enhance the “Slavery North Initiative.” The Slavery North Initiative, founded in 2020, “aims to bring public attention to the history, as well as social and cultural impacts of trans-Atlantic slavery” in the U.S. and Canada.
These funds will contribute to a three-person staff, a lecture series, Black History Month panels, an academic conference, an edited academic book, a podcast series, workshops, art and culture exhibitions, and a historical database for primary sources on the study of slavery.
In the academic year of 2023-2024, Brandeis University held a series of scholarly seminars sponsored by the Mellon Foundation: "Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and The Logics of Gender-Based Violence." The premise? How “racialized gender and sexual violence was foundational to settler colonialism and slavery and still permeates present social institutions” in the United States.
Professor Anita Hill, the woman who falsely accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, moderated one of the seminars.
“Today we will understand the relationship between the two, settler colonialism and slavery, and understand it not as two separate institutions or forms of oppression, but as two coexisting and self-supporting forms of oppression,” said (Professor) Hill. “We'll learn that through the lens of gender-based violence.”
(There is no mention of males beating up females in women’s sports nor the persecution of women in Islamic countries.)
Do Brandeis’ topics seem to be of “major scholarly significance?” Perhaps so if the university’s main objective is not to educate but to indoctrinate.
Even the unconscionable idea of reparations for slavery hasn’t escaped the Mellon Foundation.
“Evanston, Illinois, made national headlines in 2019, becoming the first city in the nation to fund reparations for its Black citizens. Although other municipalities have since passed resolutions in support of reparations, Evanston remains the only city in the country to actually distribute funds. A community-based archive called Shorefront Legacy Center—the recipient of a 2020 grant from Mellon—played a key role in bringing the program to life.”
Five million dollars has been disbursed so far to direct descendants and ancestors in the city’s effort to repair harms from discriminatory practices.
In 2024, Judicial Watch filed a class-action lawsuit against Evanston, IL, on behalf of six individuals over the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a reparations program. The suit contends that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Litigation is ongoing at this writing.
The Mellon Foundation’s obsession with slavery is just as glaring as its determination to encourage anti-American activism.