Leaked Databases Show Efforts At NPS To Erase History & Reality - Slavery, First Nations, LGBTQ, Climate, Civil War

At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, staff members asked the Trump administration to review an entire exhibit on the Black teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men and his mother’s decision to publicize it — though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.” At Arches National Park in Utah, park managers wondered whether a sign about the damage that graffiti and invasive species leave on the iconic red rock landscape violates a Trump directive to focus solely on America’s natural beauty. And at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, staff members have asked federal officials to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.”

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.

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Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??” Several submissions ask for reviews of book covers, book chapters and entire books on sale at gift shops, including “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” an autobiography by abolitionist Harriet Jacobs. “They are mostly on slavery and the black experience in Washington DC as well as a few on Lincoln’s assassination,” wrote a park official at Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. “Not sure they all disparage historical figures, but they do cover dark periods in American history.”

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At Harpers Ferry, site of abolitionist John Brown’s raid in 1859, an employee singled out a document that describes how a “mob murders” an abolitionist. “Does this denigrate the murderers?” the employee wrote. “We can reword to: ‘Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy is murdered for his views.’” A Civil War battlefield driving tour map was also flagged for its inclusion of direct quotes about the cause of the war from secession documents and Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. The quotes cite slavery as the cause. “True, but is this considered cherry picking and denigrating southerners?” the park’s staff wrote.

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https://wapo.st/4aVrK2g

Links to leaked databases:
https://archive.org/details/nps-removal-targets
https://sciop.net/datasets/doi-targets-for-removal