April 8, 2025 Story by: Publisher
Following outcry over its changes to webpages describing the Underground Railroad, the National Park Service restored language conveying the horrors of slavery and the Black men and women who risked their lives to end it.
The reversal of course followed an outcry from American historians and others responding to news reports describing how the park service had done away with the words “African American,” “bondage,” “enslavement,” “self-emancipation” and even “escape.”
“Harriet Tubman,” too, was missing, snubbing the Black Eastern Shore woman who escaped slavery and risked her own life 13 times to shepherd friends and relatives to freedom. The references were temporarily replaced with language about “ordinary men and women coming together in harmony, united to pursue the extraordinary mission of helping those in their journey to freedom.”
By the end of the day Monday, the website had been restored.
“Changes to the Underground Railroad page on the National Park Service’s website were made without approval from NPS leadership nor Department [of Interior] leadership. The webpage was immediately restored to its original content,” said Rachel Pawlitz, a spokesperson for the park service.
But before the page was restored, the move further enraged Black Americans already grappling with a legacy of erasure as President Donald Trump has removed their ancestors’ accomplishments from Arlington National Cemetery and downplayed the need for the National Museum of African-American History.
The Washington Post first reported the changes Sunday. Word spread through the Underground Railroad Facebook group, where scholars, museum staff, descendants and local keepers of the disparate Underground Railroad sites commiserated about the sanitization of what was a brutal time.
Far from being an ordinary woman, Tubman was, by all accounts, extraordinary. She could read the sky, understand the forests, disappear into disguises and lead a platoon of soldiers. She carried a pistol and told her charges she was not afraid to use it.
Despite a head injury from an overseer that gave her seizures all her life, this diminutive woman without formal education outsmarted slave catchers and constables, and gave generations of Black Marylanders a chance a freedom.
Without Tubman’s contributions to America, the “world would be a vastly different place,” Larson said. “It’s the truth. Why not celebrate that? What is wrong with that story?”
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen learned about the changes during a town hall meeting of the Anne Arundel County Caucus of African American Leaders Monday. He was shocked.
“That’s obviously outrageous,” the Maryland Democrat said. “You can’t talk about history without slavery. You can’t talk about the Underground Railroad without its conductor, Harriet Tubman.”
Initially on Monday, a National Park Service spokesperson called the media focus on the edits “dismissive” of the agency’s hard-working employees.
“The idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson declined to say why the edits were made, and at whose direction.
Discussion of slavery was once fraught in Dorchester County, where nearly half the Black population was enslaved in 1850 compared with between 5% and 10% of the Black population in Baltimore City. Yet over the last decade, Maryland’s Eastern Shore has embraced the fact that Tubman, known as the “Moses of her people,” lived in Cambridge, and that her story could bring in tourism dollars to cash-strapped Dorchester County.
The State of Maryland has invested in the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Scenic Byway, a 125-mile route through Maryland and Delaware that includes landmarks such as the home where she was born, churches where family members and friends worshipped, and a one-room schoolhouse that educated the county’s Black children before integration.
The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitors Center in Church Creek cost $21 million to build and was finished in 2017, with $8.5 million coming from the federal government and the remainder from the state of Maryland.
The site is part of the National Park Service network, but there have been no changes yet to its website. Likewise, the national Hampton Historic Site, a Towson plantation, has not changed its language yet about the brutality of slavery.
The language change is particularly frustrating because historians have been so deliberate with how they speak about the past. The preferred words are “freedom seeker” instead of “runaway,” and “enslaved peoples” rather than “slaves.” Those choices emphasize that the individual did not choose their circumstances, nor did they want to be defined by them.
The focus, said Annapolis historian Janice Hayes-Williams, has to be relentless telling of the stories as Black Marylanders know them. Historians and everyday people alike need to keep teaching children the truth despite what she called “Trump and his retribution.”
Despite the apparent restoration of the Underground Railroad language, Trump has been on a quest to purge American historical institutions of language that highlights Black American.
“We have to work around it,” Hayes-Williams said. “Black people were never written about in the school books. But we are there now.”
Wyatt said the erasure is much deeper than her family legacy. It’s about erasing all of the accomplishments of Black Americans because the current administration wants to play down the cruelty and injustices of the time.
“You don’t try to hide the things that are wrong, especially when you start to overcome it,” Wyatt continued. “That’s a testimony to the United States that she was able to overcome slavery, overcome different types of oppression. I don’t know why we need to hide that. It just shows that we have to go forward, that there is more that we have to do to make things right.”
Source:The Baltimore Banner
