The National Park Service, an agency that has been charged with preserving history as it actually happened, has been changing how it depicts events ranging from the enslavement of Black people all the way up to Jim Crow in accordance with the wishes of the Trump administration.
According to The Washington Post, the National Park Service formerly introduced the Underground Railroad by keeping its focus on the unjust enslavement of Black people in the United States of America as well as perhaps its most famous and recognizable “conductor,” Harriet Tubman.
Since Trump took office in January, and immediately took aim at eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion from the federal government, that depiction has undergone quite the facelift.
Instead of focusing on Tubman and slavery, the National Park Service appears to have engaged in what’s being called a form of sanitizing American history by removing the proper context of the Underground Railroad, referring to it as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement,” which “bridged the divides of race.”
According to Andrew Diemer, a professor at Towson University and the author of a book on one of the founders of the Underground Railroad, these changes and several others on the National Park Service website severely downplay the “legal and political forces” that were aimed at Black Americans at the time.
He continued, “Overall, the revisions seek to emphasize ‘harmony’ and ‘unity’ and to de-emphasize conflict in a way that is out of step with how historians have written about the Underground Railroad in recent decades.”
Greg Downs, a specialist in Civil War history and a professor at the University of California at Davis, indicated that the changes amounted to a significant retelling of American history.
“A country that cannot tell the truth about itself cannot assess what has led it to moments of greatness in the past and what could lead it again to greatness, Downs told the Post.
Similarly, Shawn Leigh Alexander, a W.E.B. DuBois biographer and professor at the University of Kansas, said that the changes, taken together, would lead people to conclude racism did not need to be confronted during this period in American society.
“Although these changes may appear inconsequential to some, they collectively contribute to the erasure of the historical narrative of Black struggle for civil, political, and economic rights, which continues to this day,” Alexander told the Post.
Notably, according to the Post‘s reporting, these changes were not instituted wholesale from the top down, but rather through low-level employees.
As one anonymous employee, who said they feared losing their job if they had not complied, put it, “You draw as broad a brush as possible, because the consequences of missing something are a lot more severe than the consequences of doing too much.”
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