Each February, Americans mark Black History Month by honoring figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. This year, however, the commemoration arrives amid an intensifying debate over how the nation remembers its past.
From Pennsylvania to Montana, the White House’s campaign against what it calls “woke” ideology has extended beyond classrooms to national monuments and historic sites that address slavery, racism, and other difficult chapters of U.S. history.
Advocates say the moves — and the chilling effect they create — are unprecedented.
“There are explicit and persistent efforts to erase the contributions of non-white Americans to U.S. history,” UCLA professor Tyrone Howard, who studies race and equity in education, tells Katie Couric Media. “If you’re going to tell the story of America, tell it in its totality — the good, the bad, and everything in between.”
We took a closer look at what’s happening across the country.
How the removal and revisions began
Last March, President Trump signed an executive order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directing federal agencies — including the Smithsonian Institution — to reassess how federally managed sites present the nation’s past. The order said the Smithsonian had come under the influence of a “divisive, race-centered ideology” and specifically referenced the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Shortly afterward, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a follow-up order asking all agencies in the department to track any changes made on federal land since 2020, and explain their reasoning. The Department of the Interior also put up signs encouraging the public to flag anything they felt was “negative about either past or living Americans, or fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
In the months since, the changes have rippled across the National Park Service: At the President’s House site in Philadelphia, park staff removed panels describing the lives of people enslaved by George Washington, and a federal judge later ordered the exhibit reinstated while a lawsuit filed by the city proceeds.
Other sites have faced similar scrutiny: At Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana, two exhibits were flagged as noncompliant under the new federal review of historical displays. At Muir Woods National Monument in California, climate change signage was removed. And at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Mississippi, visitor brochures were pulled for describing Medgar Evers’s killer as racist. This comes as some previously dismantled monuments — including the Albert Pike statue in Washington, D.C., which honored a Confederate general and long drew criticism in the nation’s capital — were reinstalled.
The tension over how the nation memorializes its past is not new. Over the past two decades, multiple historical markers commemorating racial violence have been vandalized, removed, or replaced — underscoring that disputes over public memory long predate the latest executive actions.
That said, Howard says the latest shift marks a rare moment of direct federal involvement in shaping public historical narratives.
“For the first time, at least in my lifetime — and I’m 50 years old — we’ve seen the federal government play a significant role in shaping what can and cannot be told about America’s past,” he says. “And that’s deeply concerning because it leaves some parts in, and omits other parts.”
What critics are saying
These changes have since sparked legal challenges. This week, a coalition led by the National Parks Conservation Association filed a federal lawsuit arguing that actions taken following the executive order led to revisions at dozens of sites nationwide, including Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks.
“Censoring science and erasing America’s history at national parks are direct threats to everything these amazing places, and our country, stand for,” Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources for the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement announcing the filing. “As Americans, we deserve national parks that tell stories of our country’s triumphs and heartbreaks alike. We can handle the truth.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Dr. Rasul Mowatt, a professor of sociology, anthropology, and natural resources at North Carolina State University, believes today’s debates feel especially fraught because formal recognition of many Indigenous and Black American histories is still relatively recent.
The National Park Service, founded in 1916, did not dedicate its first monument honoring a Black figure until nearly three decades later, when George Washington Carver’s childhood home in Missouri became a national monument in 1943. Indigenous nations, meanwhile, have spent generations pressing the federal government to change place names they view as offensive — including Devils Tower in Wyoming, which officials have repeatedly declined to rename, despite objections dating back to the 1920s.
“The United States has a long history of either no memorialization, late memorialization, contested memorialization or even memorialization removal,” Mowatt told The Guardian.
Speaking separately to Katie Couric Media, Mowatt also suggested the Trump administration’s actions may be reinforcing patterns that long predated the executive order. Interpretive placards at national monuments, he notes, already condense complex histories into digestible narratives that can truncate the fuller story. “Perhaps it’s a way to think about the executive order as formalizing what has already been there,” he tells us.
Against that backdrop, Howard says public institutions play a crucial role in presenting history accurately, especially as more states move to limit how racism is taught in classrooms. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis defended his administration’s decision to block an Advanced Placement course in African American studies from public schools, saying Black history instruction remains required in the state but arguing the AP course amounted to “indoctrination.”
“Whenever we don’t know our history, we’re bound to let certain parts of it happen again,” Howard says.
Without careful attention, critics warn, these changes could leave future generations with a narrower understanding of the nation’s past — one that risks favoring selective narratives over a full and honest reckoning with American history.
