The National Park Service (NPS), once a trusted steward of American history, is now under scrutiny for quietly reshaping how it presents the Underground Railroad and the history of slavery.
According to the Washington Post, the changes have been influenced by pressures from the Trump administration.
For years, NPS materials and exhibits centered the Underground Railroad around its core truth: the horrific reality of slavery in the United States and the brave defiance of freedom seekers like Harriet Tubman, one of the movement’s most iconic leaders.
However, since Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, historians say that truth has been recast through a lens of political sanitization.
Now, official NPS narratives describe the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement” that “bridged the divides of race,” language that scholars argue deliberately softens the brutality of slavery and glosses over the institutionalized oppression Black Americans endured.
Historians and scholars are sounding the alarm.
“The revisions seek to emphasize ‘harmony’ and ‘unity’ and to de-emphasize conflict in a way that is out of step with how historians have written about the Underground Railroad in recent decades,” said Andrew Diemer, a historian at Towson University and author of a book on one of the movement’s founders.
Others agree that these alterations signal a dangerous trend toward historical revisionism. Greg Downs, a Civil War historian at the University of California, Davis, said the changes represent a “significant retelling” of U.S. history.
“A country that cannot tell the truth about itself cannot assess what has led it to moments of greatness in the past and what could lead it again to greatness,” Downs told the Post.
The changes are not isolated to leadership-level directives, either. According to the investigation, many were implemented by low-level employees, under the unspoken threat of job loss if they failed to comply. One anonymous NPS employee expressed the pressure candidly: “You draw as broad a brush as possible, because the consequences of missing something are a lot more severe than the consequences of doing too much.”
This systemic effort to downplay the role of slavery, racism, and the lived experiences of Black Americans is part of a broader rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives during the Trump years.
The administration had sought to eliminate DEI programs across federal agencies, including the Park Service, as early as 2017.
The shift in tone is also deeply troubling to experts on Black history and civil rights.
“Although these changes may appear inconsequential to some, they collectively contribute to the erasure of the historical narrative of Black struggle for civil, political, and economic rights, which continues to this day,” said Shawn Leigh Alexander, W.E.B. Du Bois biographer and professor at the University of Kansas.
As historians continue to push back, the controversy raises serious questions about the integrity of public history in an era of political influence.
The Underground Railroad—a network built on courage and resistance—faces a new kind of battle: the fight to preserve truth against revisionism.
