[[link removed]]

TRUMP IS SCRUBBING SLAVERY FROM OUR HISTORICAL SITES  
[[link removed]]


 

Kevin Sack
September 5, 2025
The New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This is a betrayal of history’s fundamental purpose: to learn
from the past. If we ever aspire to become one nation, the entirety of
our past, including the enslavement of an estimated 10 million
people, must be acknowledged as our shared history. _

National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington,
D.C.,

 

Charles Pinckney’s stature in American history, sufficient to merit
his own National Park Service site
[[link removed]] near Charleston, S.C., has
little to do with his enslavement of scores of people to grow rice and
indigo on his plantation, Snee Farm. Rather, Pinckney is best known as
one of South Carolina’s four signatories to the Constitution, and
later as the state’s governor and a member of Congress. So when one
visits Snee Farm today, it is noteworthy, and laudable, that
Pinckney’s career as an enslaver is given appropriate prominence in
the Park Service’s overall portrait of his life — at least for
now.

The house that Pinckney built on the property is long gone. But the
cottage that replaced it now holds a visitor center that painstakingly
balances Pinckney’s constitutional achievements with the
self-evident truth that he enslaved nearly 2,000 people on seven
plantations. In one room, a panel explains that Pinckney presented his
own draft to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787,
favoring a strong central government and clear separation of powers.
Nearby is displayed an inventory of the human holdings of Snee Farm
for that same year, listing 46 people by first names such as Cudjoe
and Clarinda.

That the exhibition curates the experience of the enslaved along with
that of their enslaver — and links Pinckney’s economic interests
to his defense of slavery at the convention — only makes it more
compelling and instructive.

Soon that kind of nuanced, cleareyed portrayal could become a casualty
of the great historical whitewashing being orchestrated by the White
House. In March, President Trump issued an executive order
[[link removed]] aimed
at purging federal parks and museums of displays that cast American
history “in a negative light.” In May, Interior Secretary Doug
Burgum enforced that order with his own directive
[[link removed]] to
eliminate depictions at Park Service sites “that inappropriately
disparage Americans past or living.”

The intent seems clear. Mr. Trump aims to sand down — if not
altogether erase — some of the more inglorious episodes of American
history, particularly those involving racial and ethnic subjugation,
to feed the ravenous maw of white grievance that fuels so much of
today’s political discourse. This, of course, is antihistorical in
every sense, a betrayal of the discipline’s most fundamental
purpose: to learn from the past. If we ever aspire again to become one
nation, the entirety of our past, including the enslavement of an
estimated 10 million people
[[link removed]], must be
acknowledged as our shared history.

Under the administration’s directives, officials at all 433 National
Park Service installations and other Interior Department holdings face
a mid-September deadline to scrub exhibits, signs, films and
bookstores of statements and literature deemed to be out of
compliance. The president’s order, which also targets the
Smithsonian Institution, makes clear that race is the focus of his
cultural and political crusade to exorcise so-called wokeness from the
body politic. Any lingering doubt was surely extinguished by his
social media post
[[link removed]] taking
the Smithsonian to task for, in his view, unduly focusing on “how
bad Slavery was.”

Having worked the last decade on a new narrative history of African
American life in Charleston, I can assure Mr. Trump that slavery was,
in fact, quite bad, as were the variations on racial repression,
including lynching and Jim Crow, employed by white Americans in the
century after its demise. That said, the president’s apparent desire
to downplay the impact of slavery and its aftermath, whether willful
ignorance or strategic incitement, is not the only concern.

What also matters is his seeming intention to take institutions long
dedicated to apolitical truth-telling, the repositories of national
memory, and remake them into propagandists for a regressive and
revisionist regime. If full and truthful history does not support Mr.
Trump’s self-serving nostalgia for an imagined version of American
greatness, he will simply order up some history that does, as if it
were a jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are few places in America where history is more resonant than
Charleston, the port of entry for nearly half of the enslaved Africans
who disembarked in North America and home to the harbor fortress where
the Civil War began. Memory and history tango in South Carolina’s
Lowcountry, and disputes over context are common.

In early August, the town council on Sullivan’s Island, an affluent
neighboring beach community, thought better of its decision
[[link removed]] to
erect signs welcoming visitors to the “Gateway to Liberty Since
1776,” a tribute to the early Revolutionary War victory at what is
now known as Fort Moultrie. The reversal came after reminders from
some residents that the island also had been a gateway to bondage, as
enslaved Africans were quarantined there before transport to
Charleston for auction.

The Charleston area sites administered by the National Park Service
include Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie
[[link removed]] and the new Reconstruction Era
National Historic Park [[link removed]], a
constellation of landmarks near Beaufort. Like the Charles Pinckney
site, which opened in 1995, each has taken steps over the past three
decades to broaden public understanding of Black Americans’ fight
for freedom.

Similar efforts have been made at privately owned tourist plantations
and mansions. In 2018, Charleston’s two-century-old Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church
[[link removed]],
the site of the horrific white supremacist massacre of June 2015 (and
the focus of my book, “Mother Emanuel
[[link removed]],”
the name by which it is affectionately known), was added to the
National Register of Historic Places. Five years later, the city
opened its long-awaited International African American Museum at
Gadsden’s Wharf, once a destination for slaving ships. The
cumulative impact is that a region that once lured visitors with
moonlight and magnolias now offers a fuller and more self-reflective
account of itself.

Michael Allen, a retired Park Service official who was central to that
effort, told me he finds it “heartbreaking” to see the work
demeaned. “We weren’t making any of this history up,” he said.
“We just wanted to share it in a broader and more holistic way.”

The Park Service example illustrates how quickly authoritarian leaders
can bend long-established bureaucracies to their will. Since late
spring, many park superintendents and historians have followed orders
to flag material that might violate the administration’s new
standards. As required by Mr. Burgum’s order, signs were posted at
historic sites encouraging visitors to report content they considered
“negative.”

The flagged items submitted to headquarters
[[link removed]] this
summer reflect the struggle faced by professionals who are committed
to truthful curation but also have bills to pay and children to feed.
Trump-imposed budget cuts already have forced the agency to shed a
quarter of its
[[link removed]] permanent
work force this year.

Among the submissions obtained surreptitiously by the National Parks
Conservation Association, an advocacy group, was one from the Georgia
side of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, where
local staff members requested “further review of the ‘Causes of
the Civil War’ exhibit.” Employees at Great Smoky Mountains
National Park cited a panel that referred to the “harsh
circumstances of enslavement,” while those at the Washington
Monument called out a book that discussed the first president’s
slaveholding. And at the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, they
flagged half a dozen bookstore offerings, including a pair of
autobiographies by enslaved people and a children’s book inspired by
the true story of boys who discovered shackles buried on Sullivan’s
Island.

In 1822, white officials in Charleston linked the ringleaders of a
purported insurrection plot by enslaved people to the church that was
Mother Emanuel’s antebellum predecessor. Thirty-five men were
executed and the church was destroyed by order of the authorities, the
boards probably pried apart by some of the same hands that had nailed
them into place. I imagine the distress of some Park Service
historians to be not dissimilar, as they are forced to tear down that
which they had so conscientiously built.

Mr. Allen, the former parks official, said it felt “tantamount to
eradicating the legacy of our nation.”

I take all this a bit personally, of course. It’s not simply that
the brand of history I endeavored to write now risks government
censorship. The deeper insult I feel is on behalf of those whose
stories I and others have documented, and the heirs to their legacies.
How much of Mother Emanuel’s story — the story of a racist
massacre in a Black church that withstood oppression for two centuries
— might Mr. Trump or Mr. Burgum write off as negative or
inappropriately disparaging?

A full telling of the rich history of the African diaspora in this
country — at times tragic, at others triumphant — is vital to
understanding the undulating American narrative. The descendants of
the enslaved people who labored on Snee Farm, building the wealth of
Charles Pinckney and his young nation, deserve nothing less.

_Kevin Sack [[link removed]] is the author of
“Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness
in One Charleston Church.”_

_Get the best of the New York Times
[[link removed]] in your Inbox with a free
newsletter. Gain unlimited access to all of The Times with a digital
subscription [[link removed]]._

* African American history
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* Smithsonian
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]