With an angry executive order that targets the Smithsonian Institution — specifically taking aim at the National Museum of African American History and Culture — President Donald Trump is brazenly trying to obscure and whitewash the past. He will fail.

A document, essentially a bill of sale, from the year of our nation’s founding shows why.

“Know all men by these presents that Benj. Weight of South Kingstown in the County of Kings County and Colony of Rhode Island, practitioner of physick, for and in consideration of the sum of one hundred Dollars, to me in hand well and truly paid by Beriah Brown Junr. of Exeter … do hereby acknowledge and myself therewith fully satisfied and paid, for one negro girl named Roose and her child named Cesar.”

Trump objects to what he sees as “divisive narratives” that cast chapters of our historical record “in a negative light.” The executive order, issued Thursday, claims that “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that subjects visitors to “ideological indoctrination.”

What might have happened at the Smithsonian “in recent years” to provoke such ire? The biggest development, by far, was the opening of the African American Museum in 2016. With its richly comprehensive exhibits, its striking modern architecture and its iconic location on the National Mall, the Smithsonian’s newest major museum quickly became one of its most popular, with 1.6 million visitors last year.

Go there and you will see a crowd that looks like America — Black people, White people, Hispanics, Asian Americans, schoolchildren on a field trip, senior citizens on an outing from their retirement home. They appreciate, as Trump does not, that Black history is simply American history — put another way, that there could be no American history without African American history.

And yes, that history of nationhood begins with the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence — but also with the indelible stain of slavery. Trump objects to exhibits that might provoke “a sense of national shame.” What does he expect any decent human being to feel?

“Said negro and her child formerly being the part of the estate of my honoured father-in-law Jeremiah Gardner, late of North Kingstown, Deceas’d, and by the Will of said Deceast, said negro & child being given to sundry legatees … ”

My late wife Avis was a collector of African American historical artifacts and documents. She feared that too much of our history was being lost, and she was determined to save whatever she could. She scoured the catalogues of online auctions and the back rooms of antiques stores, looking for treasures that told parts of the American story that standard history books had long overlooked.

She found this record of the sale of the “negro girl” — whose name, given the vagaries of spellings in 18th-century documents, was almost surely Rose, not “Roose” — among a sheaf of miscellaneous documents being deaccessioned by some historical society. The fragile sheet of paper caught her eye because of the it told about the nation at the time of its founding.

This sale of an enslaved woman and her son took place in Rhode Island, not in Virginia or South Carolina. At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was legal and widely practiced in all 13 of the original colonies. Pennsylvania became the first to outlaw human bondage, in 1780.

Rose and Cesar were considered property — human chattel. They had been bequeathed in a will and were being sold by the will’s executor, as if they were pieces of furniture or prized livestock. Cesar had inherited that status. His mother was enslaved; therefore he, too, from the moment of his birth, was also enslaved.

Six months after this woman and her child changed hands, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal.” Perhaps he meant this philosophically, or even as a distant aspiration. But Jefferson, famously, was himself a major enslaver. The Declaration of Independence was meant to set him and other White colonists free from British rule, but to offer no freedom at all to Americans such as Rose and Cesar.

There is nothing ideological about any of this. It is a simple truth, and it will remain true no matter how much Trump may fulminate. He can try to rewrite history, but we have the receipts. And as the Smithsonian’s exhibits magnificently illustrate, African Americans have survived — and overcome — much worse than the frothings of a puffed-up president who fancies himself a king.

I plan to give this document, along with other artifacts and papers, to the great African American Museum on the Mall someday. Our nation’s full history will be preserved and studied long after the Trump years are an unpleasant memory.

“Said negro and her child to be to him the said Beriah Brown a free and clear estate as witness my hand and seal this Sixth day of January A.D. 1776, and in the sixteenth year of His Majesty’s Reign. Signed, sealed and delivered.”

Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. Find him on X at: @Eugene_Robinson.