Park Service Removes Brochures For Medgar Evers Monument

Late last month, we reported that the National Park Service began removing a slavery memorial at the President’s House in Philadelphia in compliance with Trump’s executive order, titled the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which the White House claimed was an order aimed at correcting “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.” The memorial honored the lives of the nine enslaved people held there who were owned by the U.S.’s first president, George Washington.

I noted in that report that “since the start of Trump’s abysmal second term, his administration has vowed to restore all honors, fort names, and monuments to the Confederacy, while forcing African American history museums to remove exhibits related to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, having his white attorneys decide how much Black history is too much Black history, and pushing right-wing curricula that whitewashes American history to omit anti-Black oppression, or spin it into a wrong that America worked tirelessly to right.”

President Donald Trump and his demonstrably white nationalist administration aren’t working to “restore truth” to American history; it’s working to restore the lies that make white Americans feel better about it. And that’s exactly why the National Park Service has also removed visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, and will no longer refer to the Klan member who killed civil rights icon Medgar Evers as a “racist.”

From Mississippi Today:

Edits to the brochure have removed that reference to Byron De La Beckwith, according to Park Service officials, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Other edits include eliminating the reference to Medgar Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot.

Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute and daughter of the couple, said the family has been told the matter is under review, “but the final product has not been put out yet.”

In 1963, Beckwith shot the civil rights leader in the back on the driveway of the Evers family home in northwest Jackson. It would take 31 more years before a Mississippi jury would convict Beckwith.

Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn to the Past, which regularly takes students and police officers on civil rights tours to the home, questioned the change to the Park Service material. “You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” he said. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”

The original brochures pulled from the home called Beckwith “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”

The White Citizens’ Council, which Stephanie Rolph, author of Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council 1954-1989, said “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race,” wasn’t the only white supremacist group Beckwith belonged to. He was also a proud member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — maybe you’ve heard of them.

So, the Park Service doesn’t believe violent, murderous, lynch-happy KKK members should automatically be deemed racist. What does the department think it is, the state of Texas?

Again, how do these constant edits and intentional omissions of Black history constitute “restoring truth” to U.S. history?

Mind you, NPS has been purging itself of Black history exhibits, including those depicting the U.S. institution of slavery, since September of last year. The department also previously came under fire for editing its website to erase Harriet Tubman from the story of the Underground Railroad, which it erroneously described as an example of “Black/White Cooperation” in the abolition movement, a descriptor it maintained even after it was shamed into restoring Tubman’s story to its website.

As Mississippi Today noted, two months after Trump signed his executive order to placate white fragility by taking a huge white-out pen to Black American history, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed with his own order, which called for the removal of “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.”

In other words, Burgum, like Trump, wants to maintain white nationalism by lying about its existence. Truthfully, Burgum told on himself with what he put in parentheses. His passive inclusion of “persons living in colonial times” betrays his true intent, which is to obfuscate what colonialism was and is, which is the white Western world’s centuries-long invasion and seizure of resources across the globe, and the transatlantic slave trade that came as a result.

Look, there are only so many ways the Trump administration can demonstrate that it’s a white supremacist organization, and, apparently, it’s planning to explore all of them.

Sad.

SEE ALSO:

Concerns Grow Over Removed Exhibits At NMAAHC

Trump Administration Doesn’t Want Us To Remember That George Washington Enslaved Black People

National Park Service Removes Brochures For Medgar Evers Monument And Will No Longer Describe The Klan Member Who Killed Evers As Racist was originally published on newsone.com