What’s Behind the Push to Erase Black History
The power to manipulate public memory shapes who gets to claim America’s past, present, and future
On a cold, overcast January afternoon, men from the National Park Service un-made a monument to Black history — American history — at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. One used a crowbar to pry an interpretive panel from its place on the brick façade of the President’s House site, where George Washington once lived, leaving behind a blank gray rectangle lined with the adhesive.
Elsewhere at the site, a man with a drill unscrewed the top of a display case and slid out a panel titled “The President’s House Site — Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” Against another brick wall, a man holding a metal scraper took down a glass-encased panel titled “ONEY ESCAPES!,” which had sat beside a screen that featured a video telling the story of Oney (or Ona) Judge, Martha Washington’s enslaved chambermaid who escaped in 1796, only to be hounded for years as the Washingtons sought to recapture her.
Once all of the offending panels were torn down, the men leaned them — mostly face down — against the brick structure, later hauling them away in the backs of trucks as if they were little more than a pile of trash.
As bystanders looked on, one simply asked the men, “Why are you doing that?”
It’s a question worth asking. And the answer reveals the Trump administration’s motivations as it plays a pivotal role in a conflict that’s been building for decades — the struggle over whether, and how, the US government will acknowledge and uplift Black history, or ignore and erase it.
The panels telling the stories of the nine people enslaved at President George Washington’s house were reportedly removed in compliance with an executive order issued last March that requires the interior secretary — who oversees the administration of US national parks — to remove any “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
In a statement, the Interior Department explained that the panels were removed because “all federal agencies are to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values.” White House spokesman David Ingle said the administration was “ensuring that we are honoring the fullness of the American story instead of distorting it in the name of left-wing ideology.”
Apparently, simply describing the lives of the Black people who were kept enslaved in Washington’s home constituted intolerable disparagement, even if — or perhaps because — every word of the panels was historically accurate.
The scene at the President’s House wasn’t an isolated incident. A group of historians, scientists, and nonprofit advocates that’s suing the Trump administration over its efforts to erase history from national parks has compiled a list of 27 national historic sites where signage has been either removed or flagged for later removal. Among them are the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, where NPS flagged materials that document pivotal moments in the Civil Rights Movement; Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site in Colorado, where signs referencing slavery and the forced removal of Native Americans were flagged or removed; Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park in Kansas, where a permanent exhibit was flagged for the sin of using the word “equity;” and Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana, where an exhibit detailing the US’s broken promises to Native Americans was flagged or removed.
The whitewashing of US history has even crossed the ocean to the Netherlands, where at the American Cemetery — the burial place for more than 8,000 US soldiers — staff from the American Battle Monuments Commission entered the visitors’ center and removed two panels that recognized Black troops who fought in World War II. One of the signs described how the same Black troops who put their lives on the line in Europe on behalf of their country were subject to segregation both at home and at the front.
The same efforts have extended online. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, the Department of Defense started wiping mentions of women, non-white, and LGBTQ+ people from its websites, and the Air Force briefly removed recruit-training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee airmen, though several of the removals were quickly reversed after public outcry. The Naval Academy last year removed from its library hundreds of books flagged as “DEI” titles, many of them focused on themes of racial injustice, Black history, Native American history, and more subjects now deemed taboo.
The sum total of these erasures seems aimed at reverse-engineering a version of the American story where white men have never done anything wrong, and non-white people — especially Black people — have never done anything especially right.
What makes this erasure campaign particularly striking is how much of what’s being removed is actually quite new. As of January 2020, of the 95,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places, which catalogues sites the federal government deems worthy of preservation, only 2% focused on Black history. By 2023, several years after a racial reckoning led to an increased focus on accurate and diverse representations of American history, that number had only climbed to 3%.
The panels pried off the President’s House last month have been in place only since 2010. The displays removed from the American Cemetery in the Netherlands were placed in 2024. In fact, although Black History Month has existed in some form since 1926 (when it began as Negro History Week), the federal government didn’t officially recognize it until 1976. If we’re thinking in terms of a human lifetime, federal acknowledgment and celebration of Black history isn’t even old enough to collect a retirement check.
But the Trump administration seems intent on retiring it permanently. While the dismantling of the President’s House panels was perhaps the most visceral demonstration of this administration’s unusual preoccupation with erasing and silencing Black history, it’s a fixation that goes all the way back to Trump’s first term. Before the anti-DEI backlash became daily news, there was the moral panic manufactured around critical race theory, and the overreaction to Nikole Hannah Jones’s 1619 Project, which — much like the President’s House exhibit — put Black Americans at the center of the American story. Trump railed against the project, even going so far as to set up the reactionary 1776 Commission, which sought to promote “patriotic education” by refocusing the study of early American history away from slavery and subjects he claimed “vilified our Founders and our founding.”
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together,” he argued.
But the administration’s erasure of Black and other nonwhite history has been met with plenty of resistance. The public has forcefully pushed back against the changes to the Department of Defense websites, the book bans, and especially the desecration of the President’s House site. The city of Philadelphia successfully sued to have the panels reinstated pending litigation on whether the administration had the legal authority to remove them in the first place, and they’ve since been rehung. What one branch of the federal government sought to erase, another branch stepped in to preserve.
The whiplash around the exhibit highlights how conditional federal recognition of Black history is, and has always been. The few monuments and memorials we have are always revocable, always at the mercy of whoever holds power.
Black history doesn’t need the federal government’s permission to exist, but public memory — the kind that shapes textbooks and school curriculums, the kind that tourists encounter at national monuments, the kind that tells Americans what their country is — does require institutional acknowledgment.
When you control public memory, you shape present power. You determine whose stories are legitimized, whose contributions are celebrated, whose suffering is recognized. Federal sites aren’t just about the past — they’re about who gets to claim institutional legitimacy in the present, who gets to occupy public space, who gets to say, “This is America, and I belong here.” So when the Trump administration removes Black history from these spaces, it’s not just erasing the past. It’s making a claim about the present and the future: that Black Americans’ place in the national story remains conditional, revocable, subject to the whims of power.
Notably, though, even as Trump leads the erasure of Black history, he pays lip service to it. In his Black History Month proclamation this year, he wrote, “we celebrate the contributions of Black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.” His framing is telling, seemingly rooted in the idea that the sole value Black people have is in service of the eternal project of making America great. As if all we’ve done has been in the interest of the nation, and not defense and affirmation of our own humanity, our own safety, and our own futures.
He would cast Black Americans as perpetual helpmeets of the American project, to be conveniently painted out of the picture when our truths make a founding father look bad or make a present-day white person uncomfortable. The notion that we could be main characters in our own story, or in the American story, is utterly foreign.
Which brings us back to the President’s House panels, and why their removal represented such a perfect encapsulation of this administration’s approach to Black history. By placing the stories of enslaved Black people right on the most storied, mythic ground in the American origin story — right where Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell stand — the President’s House disrupts white people’s sense of centrality and goodness in a space where they’re accustomed to being centered.
And in a sense, that’s the story of the entire Trump era, which in many ways can be understood as an extended backlash to the election of a Black president. Placed into context of the current growth in support for things like replacement theory, and existential race fears about white genocide and declining birth rates among white women, a larger picture emerges of Donald Trump as the avatar of whiteness forcefully reasserting itself as the only star of the American story — now, in the past, and always.
But the story of one of the women represented on the panels makes clear how wrong that is. Later in Ona Judge’s life, long after she’d escaped the Washingtons and lived out her decades in New Hampshire, she was interviewed about her experience. She told the reporter that “she never received the least mental or moral instruction of any kind while she remained in Washington’s family. But after she came to Portsmouth, she learned to read.” And when the reporter asked her whether she ever regretted leaving the Washingtons, especially since she endured years of hard labor afterward, she said this: “No, I am free, and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.”
Here was a woman born enslaved — and forced into the service of the most powerful man in America — speaking out and telling her story, asserting herself as a fully self-possessed person with agency, with no doubt about her own humanity and worthiness of a full free life, however hard it might have been. She rejected living as a footnote in Washington’s history, and in America’s history, and carved out a place for herself. Her story existed long before those panels went up — preserved in her own words, passed down through generations, kept alive by Black historians and communities who never needed federal permission to remember.
Her story is a prime example of Black folks’ continued insistence upon our own agency and significance, and our refusal to be relegated to a side story in someone else’s drama, or to be silenced or forced to speak only in gratitude for what America has supposedly given us. That’s always been the through-line of Black history, with or without federal recognition.
Ona Judge didn’t need a memorial panel to make her story true. But the panel mattered. It placed her story on sacred American ground, disrupted the founding mythology, gave schoolchildren visiting Independence Hall a different view of America’s origin story to carry with them. A few weeks ago it was gone, now it’s been returned, and some time in the future it may be gone again. As the pendulum swings back and forth, Black Americans will continue to claim space for our stories at the center of American history.