Changes to a National Park Service (NPS) website that removed any mention of Harriet Tubman from a text about the Underground Railroad were “made without approval from NPS leadership,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Hyperallergic. The NPS has restored its original text after outcry in light of a Washington Post report identifying the altered webpage earlier this week.
Before the text was restored yesterday, April 7, the webpage titled “What is the Underground Railroad?” featured a whittled-down version of its 2022 text that purged Tubman’s name and involvement almost entirely. Her full-body portrait and an introductory quote about steering the Underground Railroad were replaced with a small cropped headshot, among those of other abolitionists who participated in the freedom pipeline, each presented as makeshift postage stamps with the words “Black/White Cooperation.”
The edited text was sparse and vague, omitting concrete details on the movement’s lead-up and inception, the number of freed people, or a list of specific locations included in the liberation network. Unlike the original and since-restored text, which centers “the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the first two lines of the edited website hailed the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement,” and emblematic of “the American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
The edited text also stated that the Underground Railroad “bridged the divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality,” evoking Trump’s efforts to dismantle critical race theory and downplay the oppression and subjugation of Black Americans in the United States.
NPS has not yet responded to Hyperallergic‘s inquiry about who was responsible for the edit.
Per the website, the edits were made on March 4 of this year, nearly one month after the NPS removed any mention of the word “transgender” from all of its webpages — including a page devoted to the Stonewall Monument in Manhattan — in line with Trump’s anti-trans mandates.
Since January, Trump has set aim on federal institutions and landmarks that have incorporated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives in their engagement with the public or simply presented a critical view of American history.
Most recently, his March 27 executive order targeted the what Trump called “race-centered ideology” and inclusive views of gender at the Smithsonian Institution. The order directly cited a historic Philadelphia landmark managed by the NPS that collaborated with a human rights nonprofit in February 2023 to develop a training session for creating more inclusive educational guided tours on the American Revolution. The collaboration was lambasted by the conservative media outlet National Review last fall.