Black Americans Fight to Stop Federal Agencies’ Quiet Deletion of Their History – Truthout

Agencies are scrambling to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion.
Originally published by Capital B.
Alan Spears remembers visiting Gettysburg National Military Park with his parents in the 1970s. They wanted something educational, free, and fun to do with their only son, and the park was an obvious choice, given Spears’ interests — his favorite television show as a child was The Rat Patrol, about soldiers during World War II.
It was there, at the Pennsylvania park, a roughly 1½-hour drive from Washington, D.C., that Spears became infatuated with history: the cannons everywhere, the statues of soldiers holding guns.
“I fell in love with war the way a kid might on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam or at Harpers Ferry. But I also began to learn about what that conflict — the Civil War — actually meant, and I started to see it through adult eyes,” said the 60-year-old D.C. native, who went on to study U.S. history at Clark University and Howard University. “My parents and the National Park Service are to blame — they hooked me solidly into U.S. history.”
It’s because of these experiences that Spears, the senior director of cultural resources in the National Parks Conservation Association’s government affairs department, feels a combination of hurt, anger, and concern over attempts to scrub Black history from federal websites.
In recent weeks, as federal agencies scramble to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion and other supposedly harmful subjects, they have sought to censor information on their websites about the long and ongoing struggle for Black equality, or erase Black stories entirely. This pattern, according to historians, whitewashes the past — and it should encourage people to push back.
“When you start to fiddle around with history, that isn’t what makes a country great,” Spears told Capital B. “It makes us weaker. And it makes us meaner, because we’re going to be much less informed about the broad sweep of U.S. history and all the people who have contributed to making this country a good country.”
Controversy erupted earlier this week after reports surfaced that the National Park Service had rewritten a webpage about the Underground Railroad to de-emphasize the consequential role that Harriet Tubman played in Black resistance to enslavement. After public outcry, the agency restored Tubman’s photograph and a quote mentioning human bondage.
Trump in March signed an order maintaining that the Smithsonian Institution is being influenced by a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order specifically describes the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which Trump once praised, as being “oppressive,” and it empowers Vice President JD Vance to review all Smithsonian programs and centers and remove what the president calls “improper ideology from such properties.”
(Kevin Young, the museum’s director, also has stepped down. A museum spokesperson has said that Young’s departure is “totally unrelated” to Trump’s order.)
Earlier in March, information about the baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s U.S. Army career — he was drafted during World War II — was briefly pulled from the U.S. Department of Defense website. The URL for the page temporarily included the tag “dei.” A profile of Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, who served in the Vietnam War and became the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, also was removed and then reinstated.
And that same month, a demolition crew began razing Black Lives Matter Plaza in D.C. in response to Republican threats to district funding. The mural was created after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and had proclaimed, in vivid yellow paint, that “Black Lives Matter.”
Such purging has only bolstered some Black Americans’ determination to preserve their history. Sisters Jo and Joy Banner co-founded the Descendants Project, a nonprofit focused on supporting formerly enslaved communities on the Gulf Coast. Preservationists, the Banners live in Wallace, Louisiana, a town that was settled by Black soldiers who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War.
The sisters can trace their family roots back to those who had been enslaved on local plantations, and hope to reclaim the narrative power behind their ancestors’ story by restoring properties in the area.
“The first time [enslaved Africans] were brought here was a ripping away of their history, a taking away of their names and their culture,” Jo Banner told Capital B.
In October, the National Park Service published the results of a multiyear study of an 11-mile stretch of the Great River Road along the west bank of the Mississippi River in west St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. The report noted the “exceptional integrity” of the landscape, which creates “a sense of the feeling of living and working in the plantation system in the American South.”
Despite these findings, the agency in February withdrew the area from consideration for National Historic Landmark designation — a decision many see as part of a pattern of erasure.
“If we want our own liberation — if we want to own telling our true history — we have to own it,” Jo Banner said, referring to her and her sister’s attempts to elevate Black history in their community by buying a plantation and creating a museum.
Keisha Blain, a professor of history and Africana studies at Brown University, said that the recent changes are part of a longer trend.
“Conservative politicians have been waging a war against the teaching of Black history for years — Florida is just one example — and so it’s not all that surprising that DEI is being dismantled in various ways,” she told Capital B.
In 2023, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gained national notoriety for leading the charge against Advanced Placement African American Studies. His administration blocked the course from being taught in the state’s public schools, insisting that it would make white students feel guilty about the past.
“Avoiding the difficult aspects of history may bring comfort to some, but it leads to ill-informed public policy, and we’re seeing this unfold in real time,” Blain said.
“One of the reasons that DEI is under attack is that far too many Americans are ignorant of history,” she added, noting that if you understand the country’s legacy of exclusion — the fact that President Woodrow Wilson swiftly segregated the federal workforce in 1913, for instance — then you understand why it’s imperative to have programs that can ensure equal access and opportunity.
Spears underscored that people must let the administration know that they’re keeping a close watch — that they care about history and want to learn about the good and the bad. Without such vigilance, he argued, we get things such as the Lost Cause, the mythology claiming that the Civil War wasn’t fueled by the issue of human bondage.
“We must be active and engaged. We can’t wait for everything to disappear,” Spears said. “When we see the first inkling that someone is trying to change a website or the physical layout of a city, we must let folks know that we don’t believe that the erasure of people and history from our national narrative is a good idea.”
Capital B staff writer Adam Mahoney contributed to this report.
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Brandon Tensley is Capital B‘s national politics reporter.
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