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.
The suit cited Trump’s January 2025 executive order that required federal agencies to eliminate any operations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) 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 White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday evening.
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 to restore a slavery exhibit in Philadelphia after pieces of artwork and informational displays were removed at the President’s House Site.
The administration also changed which days Americans can visit national parks for free this year in a November directive, removing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth. In August, it called for an expansive review of the Smithsonian’s museum exhibitions, materials and operations to ensure they aligned with the president’s view of history.
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.”
