That executive order said that materials at national parks should not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” It added that they should emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”
To comply with the order so far, the Park Service has taken down plaques about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a sign about climate change at Fort Sumter in South Carolina and a sign about Indigenous people at Acadia National Park in Maine.
Last month, Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts prohibited further removals. Judge Kelley, a Biden appointee, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.
In her ruling, Judge Kelley wrote that national parks could help educate visitors about difficult periods of American history, as well as contributions made by people of color, gay and transgender figures, women and other marginalized groups.
“From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park,” the judge wrote, “the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly.”