Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta, where the house that one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement grew up in is the centerpiece of this National Park Site, is being scrutinized by the Department of the Interior for presenting information that is embarrassing to the United States. On March 27, 2025 the White House issued an Executive Order to the National Park Service titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The Executive Order order tells the Park Service to:
“take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
A week ago the parks were supposed to begin removing signage that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” In earlier reports, I told you about interpretive signage at Acadia National Park that discussed the rising ocean temperature as a challenge to the park’s environment that had to be taken down, and about signage at Gateway National Park in New York and New Jersey that was taken down because it mentioned slavery.
Now references to slavery and lynching at Martin Luther King’s home in Atlanta are being removed. Of course, if there was no slavery, or lynching, or segregation, or denial of Civil Rights to Black people, there would not have been any call to create the Martin Luther King Junior National Historical Park. Martin Luther King would have just been a talented preacher.
Is it unfair to discuss slavery and lynching at the site? Well, let us remember that King was assassinated at a Memphis hotel by a white supremacist after a reward had been announced for King’s killing. Sounds remarkably like a lynching to me.
The park is the centerpiece of America coming to terms with its history of discrimination against African Americans and with the murder of a leading voice for equality. When I was at the site with my wife and kids two decades ago, I was very impressed with the Rangers and historians there who created programs that adults and kids could learn about this history and feel empathy for those who were the target of oppression for more than three hundred years. Let us hope that this site that tells us about that past is not erased.
Please call your Congressional Representative and your Senators to tell them that the Parks are places where we can learn about our history, where we can find out what our promise as a nation is, as well as realistically confront our shortcomings.
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