Whitewashing history? Trump admin directs removal of 'negative' slavery exhibits

TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump is being accused of whitewashing American history after his administration ordered removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at national parks, including a historic photo of an enslaved black man showing scars on his back from repeated whippings.

The photograph, called "The Scourged Back,” and taken in 1863 when the camera was still in its infancy, is one of the most powerful and historically significant visuals from the American Civil War. The man in the photograph, identified as "Peter," or “Gordon,” is said to have escaped from a Louisiana plantation and dodged bloodhounds to make a perilous 40-mile journey to a Union Army encampment in Baton Rouge. Visual evidence of violence he was subjected to helped shape public perception and strengthened support for the Union cause against the Confederate Army, eventually resulting in the abolition of slavery.

But under the new Trump directive, such material emphasizes negative aspects of American history without acknowledging progress the country has made. In March this year, the President signed an executive order directing the Interior Department, which manages the country’s nearly 500 treasured national parks and monuments from Grand Canyon to Statue of Liberty, to eliminate exhibits that reflects any “corrosive ideology” that disparages America and its heroes.

In recent weeks, Trump has criticized museums and institutions such as the Smithsonian for focusing too much on "how bad slavery was,” accusing them of dwelling on the "horrible" aspects of the past rather than highlighting America's successes and “brightness.” The Smithsonian complex of museums, close to the White House, includes the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian, alongside the Air and Space Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, among other showpieces of the country’s complex history.

Trump has also opposed removal of statues of confederate heroes, initiation the process of restoring the original names of nine U.S. Army installations previously named for Southern leaders, many of whom espoused and defended slavery.

Park officials are now said to be interpreting Trump’s orders to remove or delete exhibits and information relating to slavery, racism, sexism, persecution of Indigenous people, and lgbqt rights. Among information being scrubbed is notes from the President George Washington’s House site in Philadelphia, where the country’s first President kept slaves, like many of his fellow “founding fathers.” Staff are being told that such notes do not comply with the current policy aimed at talking about positive aspects of US history.

“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” a Park official told the Washington Post, among several media outlets that are red-flagging the Trump administration's doctoring of history.

Most historians, and even some park officials, are opposed to the whitewashing of a complex history that has already erased its indigenous past for the most part, with very little mention of the original native population that has been exterminated. One former Park official wrote to the paper lamenting the manipulation of a collective history that has “good stories and ones that make us uncomfortable.” The National Parks, he said, "show us the beauty and diversity of our land and tell the stories of our greatest achievements like the ratification of our Constitution, the flight of the first airplane to our darker moments like slavery and the Civil War.”