Ohhh noooo, President Trump is a racist! Black Enterprise on Monday, April 7. 2025 publish an article headlined, “Pressured By Trump, Park Service Rewrites Underground Railroad Story, Downplays Slavery And Harriet Tubman.”
Changes to National Park Service narrative aim to erase the harsh realities of slavery and the pivotal role of Harriet Tubman, sparking backlash from historians.
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.
“Welcome to equality! White history has been a target for erasure for many years, so just to be equal, don’t you think black history should be erased as well?” said Thomas Robb, the National Director of the Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan based centrally in Harrison, Arkansas. “I’ve said many times that non-white people wouldn’t be able to handle equality. Nothing whatsoever can be done to appease these ungrateful non-whites in America. In this case, here is this woman, and an ugly one at that, Harriet Tubman. It’s not enough that we have a Harriet Tubman Day every March 10th., and her face is currently on a commemorative $5 gold piece, a silver half dollar, and yet even on the silver dollar! Also, after December 31. 2030, her face will replace Andrew Jackson’s on the twenty dollar bill. Of all the non-white countries in the world how many do you think have pictures of White people on their coinage? Harriet Tubman is celebrated more than any one of our forefathers! If this doesn’t bother you, it should.”
