This blog post was originally published on the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums Blog on May 27, 2025.
As my colleagues and I catalogue the damage being done to our sector, we take heart from a small but growing cadre of museums taking principled positions in the face of attacks on their institutions and the communities they serve. In 2019, Ann Burroughs, President & CEO, Japanese American National Museum, wrote a guest post for CFM about how JANM took a stand against the incarceration of migrant children under the first Trump administration, and why that action was a natural and necessary outgrowth of their mission and values. In today’s post, Ann tells us how JANM is navigating the current disruptions, and why their leadership has chosen to speak out.
–Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums.
At the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), our mission is rooted in one of the gravest civil liberties violations in U.S. history: the mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Our founders envisioned a space where history would be preserved, justice remembered, and future injustice prevented. That vision remains our guiding principle today.
Our mission is grounded in place, memory, and moral clarity. We are located in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, on the very site where more than 37,000 Japanese Americans were ordered to report and board buses bound for incarceration camps in 1942. JANM stands at a literal and symbolic ground zero point in the civil rights history of this country. We are not only a museum—we are a place of conscience, built by the community for the community, and committed to ensuring that what happened to Japanese Americans never happens to anyone again.
That clarity of purpose is what led our Board of Trustees to speak out in February 2025, as a wave of federal policies began to echo the same injustices that defined our founding. The threats were stark: the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to justify mass deportations without due process; the construction of a migrant detention camp at Guantánamo Bay; the attempt to revoke birthright citizenship and to erase Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. These are not abstract policy proposals. They are chilling reminders of a past we know too well.
The distant threats of state-sanctioned exclusion have become immediate and real. The ideological scaffolding is the same: racism masquerading as national security, xenophobia under the guise of law and order. This is how it began in 1942—and we have seen what happens when fear overrides justice. Our history gives us not only the right, but the responsibility, to speak out and a few LA museums and arts organizations are doing just that.
Our Trustees deliberated with intention. We understood the risks—political, financial, institutional. But we also knew what was at stake. Remaining silent would betray our founders, our mission, the communities we serve and history itself. Our statement was not a political act. It was a moral one. When cuts to the NEH hit our education program, we were prepared.
We have seen how institutions like the Smithsonian African American Museum, Harvard University, and others have been targeted. But we will not compromise our principles. This is not the first time JANM has taken a stand. In 2017, when the federal government implemented a travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, we raised our voice in opposition. That decision was championed by the late Secretary Norman Mineta, then Chair of our Board, who believed it was not only appropriate, but essential, for JANM to speak history to the present. That act of moral leadership helped shape who we are today.
We also remember 9/11, when the Japanese American community—no strangers to racial profiling and the consequences of being seen as “the enemy”—were among the first to stand in solidarity with Muslim and Arab Americans. We knew then, as we know now, that silence in the face of injustice is complicity.
At JANM, memory is not passive. It is an act of resistance. It is a tool for resilience. It is a moral responsibility. Our Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy was created to be a civic space where history is made relevant, where communities gather, and where dialogue fosters democratic values.
We are now tasking the Democracy Center with bringing our Trustees’ statement to life—through public lectures, community forums, youth engagement, art, and storytelling. We are launching flagship programming that weaves together the historical and the contemporary, the personal and the political. Our aim is to model how memory can be harnessed to defend democratic ideals and to ask ourselves critical questions such as how do we become good ancestors; how do we use the lessons of history to shape a more just future? These are not rhetorical questions—they are urgent imperatives.
Museums are not neutral. They are civic institutions embedded in communities, shaped by the histories they preserve and the futures they help imagine. As cultural organizations, we must reckon with our roles—not as bystanders, but as participants in shaping civic life.
We know that not every institution is able to speak out as publicly as we have. We understand and respect the complexities, the pressures, and the constraints. But we also know that for us silence is not an option. Few people stood up for Japanese Americans in 1942, and we now feel compelled to stand up for others.
JANM will continue to serve as a resource, a partner, and a source of solidarity for institutions navigating these same challenges. We offer our experience not as a prescription, but as an invitation—to reflect, to engage, and to act with integrity.
We believe that history is not only something to be preserved, but something to be lived, taught, and defended. We speak out not just to remember the past, but to shape the future. In doing so, we fulfill our responsibility to our founders, our communities, to history itself, and to generations yet to come.
At JANM, we remain unwavering in our commitment to democracy, equity, and human dignity. We were founded to tell the truth—and we will not stop now.
Featured image: The Japanese American National Museum’s Pavilion building. Photo by Paloma Dooley.
