by Ben Jealous
The last living link of my family’s story of origin in antebellum Southern Virginia died at age 105 a few years ago.
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My grandmother, Mamie Todd, was born in 1916. Her grandparents were born into slavery. She fought Jim Crow. She stood up for Black teachers and students in a segregated school system in which she taught in her early career. She supported my mom when, at 12, she signed on as a named plaintiff in one of the feeder cases to Brown v. Board of Education. And she stood by mom every step of the way when three years after that, my mom helped desegregate her high school.
That’s the kind of strength I come from. That’s the kind of history it seems the Trump administration now wants to erase.
The Washington Post and other outlets are reporting that the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion from every corner of our federal government has now spread into the heart of the National Park Service. Web pages about slavery and the Underground Railroad have been edited to downplay the brutal reality of bondage and the contributions of Black leaders. The photo of Harriet Tubman that for years greeted visitors to an NPS page about the Underground Railroad has been deleted. A webpage about the Niagara Movement – a precursor to the NAACP founded in 1905 by W.E.B. Du Bois – was rewritten. A statement about the group’s “renewed sense of resolve in the struggle for freedom and equality” was shortened simply to a “renewed sense of resolve.”
Heroic Americans gave their lives fighting for freedom and equality. Now, the Trump administration is trying to edit those very words out of the official American story.
Some say these changes are minor. I say they are surgical. They are subtle, yes – but profoundly damaging. As one historian put it, these edits suggest that racism no longer needs to be confronted in America. And that’s the point.
This is not about saving space on a government website. It is about shrinking the story of who we are as a people.
Some Park Service employees who edited the websites say they made the changes out of fear. Others were simply guessing what the administration wanted. When workers are deleting key figures and events in Black history without being told, just to stay safe in their jobs, we are in dangerous territory.
We’ve seen this before. Last month, we learned that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s DEI purge at the Pentagon included deleting photos and posts about the Tuskegee Airmen. That hit home. Two of my grandfather’s first cousins were Tuskegee Airmen. Those men risked everything for a country that treated them as second-class citizens – and now this administration is reluctant to give them even a photo and a caption.
They even removed a webpage about Jackie Robinson’s military service. They later said it was a “mistake.” But when you see how wide this purge has spread, it starts to look less like a mistake and more like a mission.
A recent executive order from President Trump set its sights on the Smithsonian. They are targeting the very museums created to tell the full story of our country. What does this mean for the very existence of the National Museum of African American History and Culture? Or the National Museum of the American Indian?
What happens to truth when it is inconvenient to power?
We cannot rely on oral tradition alone. Our history deserves permanence. It deserves pages and plaques and national monuments and memorials. It deserves official recognition, not redaction.
I think of my family’s own story – the parts that were buried for generations. I’m descended from the main Black leader of the Readjusters, a multiracial political movement that briefly, but very successfully, governed post-Reconstruction Virginia. They were left out of the history books for more than a century. Not because they were not important, but because they were.
History is power. That’s why they are going after it.
The Trump administration’s attacks are not about race-blind policy. They are about race-based erasure. They support monuments to those who fought to preserve slavery while censoring stories of resistance. That’s not color-blindness. That’s complicity.
It should not have to keep being said over and over again, but we will not let them diminish our communities’ contributions or deny our place in the American story. We are still here. And like the men and women of the Niagara Movement, we renew our sense of resolve. Our resolve is real. And it is rising.
Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
