In late March, the INDY reported that North Carolina libraries and cultural centers were bracing for impact from the Trump administration’s sweeping federal reductions. A March 14 executive order had called for drastic cuts to the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a small federal agency that helps fund cultural institutions across the country.
This week, those impacts are beginning to set in: According to a press release sent out this afternoon by Durham’s Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, IMLS has terminated a $330,800 multi-year federal grant awarded to the center in 2024. The grant funded a staff position, community programming, and a new exhibition, according to Angela Thorpe Mason, executive director of the Pauli Murray Center.
On a phone call, Mason told the INDY that the terminated funding made up 16% of the organization’s 2025 budget and was projected to cover “roughly 20%” of the 2026 budget.
The funding termination notice stated that “[the] grant is no longer consistent with the [IMLS’s] priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program.”
Murray—an activist, poet, Episcopalian priest, lawyer, and renowned legal scholar—was born in 1910 and spent their childhood in Durham. The home they grew up in, a Robin’s egg blue mill home located in Durham’s historic West End neighborhood, is a National Historic Landmark. It officially opened its doors as the Pauli Murray Center in September 2024, after years of restoration.
On March 31, upon President Trump’s appointment of Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith E. Sonderling as acting head of IMLS, the organization’s entire staff of around 70 employees was put on administrative leave for up to 90 days.
IMLS awarded over $30 million in grant funding to North Carolina between 2020 and 2024. While some of that funding went to public libraries, other grants were awarded to cultural organizations like the Pauli Murray Center.
“The notion that Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s lived experience as a Southerner, and work as a Black, gender non-confirming civil, women’s, and human rights activist is against national interest, and [is] essentially un-American, is abhorrent and indicative of the violent federal censorship the Center has been navigating over the course of the last month,” Mason wrote in the press release.
The censorship in question is the removal of a biographical page about Pauli Murray from a National Park Service (NPS) website, which board chair Jesse Huddleston noted early last month. The deletion is in keeping with another sweep initiated by the Trump administration; this one of references related, in various ways, to history and diversity. (In an NPR report from last month, those edits have even stretched to taking down generic multiracial stock images on federal websites.)
A recent public outcry drew attention to a series of NPS website deletions of references to the Underground Railroad, slavery, and Harriet Tubman, per a Washington Post report, leading the NPS to restore those pages.
Huddleston tells the INDY that the biographical page for Pauli Murray has not been restored yet; meanwhile, the NPS page for Murray’s home (edited last month to remove the T from LGBTQ) still lists outdated information about the location as being closed to the public.
According to the Pauli Murray Center, the organization has contributed nearly $40,000 to the local economy since opening seven months ago.
“Energized by Murray’s words and example, we continue to welcome all people of peace to join us in an expansive circle of justice, drawn large enough to include those on the margins and those who exclude us,” Huddleston wrote in the press release. “And as we steward a one-of-a-kind National Historic Landmark, we reject despair and press onward rooted in our dignity, trusting in the generative abundance that exists even in the face of such injustice.”
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Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email sedwards@indyweek.com.