The Trump administration’s censorship campaign has extended to the National Park Service.
The White House has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits documenting American slavery, including a 1863 portrait of an ex-slave, often referred to as either Peter or Gordon, and the thick, variegated whip scars on his “scourged back.” Gordon’s photograph became one of the most widely circulated images of the horrors of U.S. slavery during the abolitionist movement.
The mass information scrub is all in an effort to make the Park Service compliant with Donald Trump’s March executive order that directed the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” according to four sources that spoke with The Washington Post.
That order has been interpreted by the Parks Service to mean any information relating to racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights, or the persecution of Native Americans, the Post reported Monday night.
Sites affected include Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia, where abolitionist John Brown led an unsuccessful raid that eventually led to his capture and the start of the Civil War. Staff at Harpers Ferry flagged more than 30 signs, according to the Post.
Another affected site is the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where George Washington kept slaves. Exhibits at that location apparently do not comply with the Park Service’s new order, according to sources that spoke with the Post.
All signage under the department’s purview is subject to review, according to Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz.
“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” Pawlitz said.
But the White House’s intrusion is historically unprecedented, according to historians.
“This represents an enormous increase in federal power and control over the things we learn,” Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the history of education, told the Post. “Brought to you by the team that says education should be state and local.”
America’s parks aren’t the only ones undergoing an enormous rescission. Over the course of the summer, the president has wielded a heavy hand in reshaping the Kennedy Center’s programming, and forced the Smithsonian Museum to remove mentions of Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under pressure from the White House. (Those mentions were later reinstated.)
The administration also issued a memo challenging the application of educational lenses on race, gender, and oppression in U.S. history, and accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
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