WASHINGTON – Conservation and historical organizations sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over National Park Service policies that the groups say erase history and science from America’s national parks.
A lawsuit filed in Boston says orders by President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have forced park service staff to remove or censor exhibits that share factually accurate and relevant U.S. history and scientific knowledge, including about slavery and climate change.
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The changes at exhibits came in response to a Trump executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks. It directed the Interior Department to ensure those sites do not display elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Burgum later directed removal of “improper partisan ideology” from museums, monuments, landmarks and other public exhibits under federal control.
The groups behind the lawsuit said that a federal campaign to review interpretive materials has escalated in recent weeks, leading to the removal of numerous exhibits that discuss the history of slavery and enslaved people, civil rights, treatment of Indigenous peoples, climate science, and other “core elements of the American experience.”
The suit was filed by a coalition that includes the National Parks Conservation Association, American Association for State and Local History, Association of National Park Rangers and Union of Concerned Scientists. It comes as a federal judge on Monday ordered that an exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington must be restored at his former home in Philadelphia.
The park service removed explanatory panels last month from Independence National Historical Park, the site where George and Martha Washington lived with nine of their slaves in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital. The judge ordered the exhibits restored on Presidents Day, the federal holiday honoring Washington’s legacy.
Besides the Philadelphia case, the park service has flagged for removal interpretive materials describing key moments in the civil rights movement, the groups said. For example, at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama, officials have flagged about 80 items for removal.
The permanent exhibit at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in Kansas has been flagged because it mentions “equity," the lawsuit says. A Pride flag was removed at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City that marks the launch of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Signage that has disappeared from Grand Canyon National Park said settlers pushed Native American tribes “off their land” for the park to be established and “exploited” the landscape for mining and grazing.
“Censoring science and erasing America’s history at national parks are direct threats to everything these amazing places, and our country, stand for,” said Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources at the parks conservation association.
“National parks serve as living classrooms for our country, where science and history come to life for visitors,” Spears added. “As Americans, we deserve national parks that tell stories of our country’s triumphs and heartbreaks alike. We can handle the truth.”
The Interior Department said Tuesday it has appealed the court’s ruling in the Philadelphia case.
“The National Park Service routinely updates exhibits across the park system to ensure historical accuracy and completeness. If not for this unnecessary judicial intervention, updated interpretive materials providing a fuller account of the history of slavery at Independence Hall would have been installed in the coming days,'' an Interior spokesperson said in an email.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ruled Monday that all materials from the Philadelphia exhibit must be restored in their original condition while a lawsuit challenging the removal's legality plays out. She prohibited Trump officials from installing replacements that explain the history differently.
Rufe, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, began her written order with a quote from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” and compared the Trump administration to the book’s totalitarian regime called the Ministry of Truth, which revised historical records to align with its own narrative.
“You cannot tell the story of America without recognizing both the beauty and the tragedy of our history," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization that filed the lawsuit on behalf of the advocacy groups.
Trump's “effort to erase history and science in our national parks violates federal law and is a disgrace that neither honors our country’s legacy nor its future,” she said.