The National Park Service rewrote a webpage on its website that describes the Underground Railroad to reduce the significance of Harriet Tubman, amid an anti-DEI push by the Trump administration.
According to the Washington Post, officials removed a large portrait of Tubman as well as her quote at the top of the page which read: “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Tubman’s image and quote were replaced with commemorative stamps of various civil rights leaders which includes the phrase “Black/White Cooperation.”
References to “enslaved” people, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the word “slavery” were also removed from the first two paragraphs .Those paragraphs now tout the “American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
Fergus Bordewich, a historian and the author of a book about the Underground Railroad, told CNN that the removal of Tubman is “offensive and absurd.”
“To oversimplify history is to distort it,” Bordewich added. “Americans are not infants: they can handle complex and challenging historical narratives. They do not need to be protected from the truth.”
One of Trump’s first acts when he returned to office was to sign a sweeping executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government.
Since then, several government websites have made controversial changes to comply with the order, including the Pentagon taking down a page about Jackie Robinson, the first Black Major League Baseball athlete in the modern era. They later restored it after backlash.
