Charles Pinckney’s stature in American history, sufficient to merit his own National Park Service site near Charleston, S.C., has little to do with his enslavement of scores of people to grow rice and indigo on his plantation, Snee Farm. Rather, Pinckney is best known as one of South Carolina’s four signatories to the Constitution, and later as the state’s governor and a member of Congress. So when one visits Snee Farm today, it is noteworthy, and laudable, that Pinckney’s career as an enslaver is given appropriate prominence in the Park Service’s overall portrait of his life — at least for now.
The house that Pinckney built on the property is long gone. But the cottage that replaced it now holds a visitor center that painstakingly balances Pinckney’s constitutional achievements with the self-evident truth that he enslaved nearly 2,000 people on seven plantations. In one room, a panel explains that Pinckney presented his own draft to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, favoring a strong central government and clear separation of powers. Nearby is displayed an inventory of the human holdings of Snee Farm for that same year, listing 46 people by first names such as Cudjoe and Clarinda.
That the exhibition curates the experience of the enslaved along with that of their enslaver — and links Pinckney’s economic interests to his defense of slavery at the convention — only makes it more compelling and instructive.
Soon that kind of nuanced, cleareyed portrayal could become a casualty of the great historical whitewashing being orchestrated by the White House. In March, President Trump issued an executive order aimed at purging federal parks and museums of displays that cast American history “in a negative light.” In May, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum enforced that order with his own directive to eliminate depictions at Park Service sites “that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
The intent seems clear. Mr. Trump aims to sand down — if not altogether erase — some of the more inglorious episodes of American history, particularly those involving racial and ethnic subjugation, to feed the ravenous maw of white grievance that fuels so much of today’s political discourse. This, of course, is antihistorical in every sense, a betrayal of the discipline’s most fundamental purpose: to learn from the past. If we ever aspire again to become one nation, the entirety of our past, including the enslavement of an estimated 10 million people, must be acknowledged as our shared history.
Under the administration’s directives, officials at all 433 National Park Service installations and other Interior Department holdings face a mid-September deadline to scrub exhibits, signs, films and bookstores of statements and literature deemed to be out of compliance. The president’s order, which also targets the Smithsonian Institution, makes clear that race is the focus of his cultural and political crusade to exorcise so-called wokeness from the body politic. Any lingering doubt was surely extinguished by his social media post taking the Smithsonian to task for, in his view, unduly focusing on “how bad Slavery was.”
Having worked the last decade on a new narrative history of African American life in Charleston, I can assure Mr. Trump that slavery was, in fact, quite bad, as were the variations on racial repression, including lynching and Jim Crow, employed by white Americans in the century after its demise. That said, the president’s apparent desire to downplay the impact of slavery and its aftermath, whether willful ignorance or strategic incitement, is not the only concern.
What also matters is his seeming intention to take institutions long dedicated to apolitical truth-telling, the repositories of national memory, and remake them into propagandists for a regressive and revisionist regime. If full and truthful history does not support Mr. Trump’s self-serving nostalgia for an imagined version of American greatness, he will simply order up some history that does, as if it were a jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There are few places in America where history is more resonant than Charleston, the port of entry for nearly half of the enslaved Africans who disembarked in North America and home to the harbor fortress where the Civil War began. Memory and history tango in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, and disputes over context are common.
In early August, the town council on Sullivan’s Island, an affluent neighboring beach community, thought better of its decision to erect signs welcoming visitors to the “Gateway to Liberty Since 1776,” a tribute to the early Revolutionary War victory at what is now known as Fort Moultrie. The reversal came after reminders from some residents that the island also had been a gateway to bondage, as enslaved Africans were quarantined there before transport to Charleston for auction.
The Charleston area sites administered by the National Park Service include Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie and the new Reconstruction Era National Historic Park, a constellation of landmarks near Beaufort. Like the Charles Pinckney site, which opened in 1995, each has taken steps over the past three decades to broaden public understanding of Black Americans’ fight for freedom.
Similar efforts have been made at privately owned tourist plantations and mansions. In 2018, Charleston’s two-century-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of the horrific white supremacist massacre of June 2015 (and the focus of my book, “Mother Emanuel,” the name by which it is affectionately known), was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Five years later, the city opened its long-awaited International African American Museum at Gadsden’s Wharf, once a destination for slaving ships. The cumulative impact is that a region that once lured visitors with moonlight and magnolias now offers a fuller and more self-reflective account of itself.
Michael Allen, a retired Park Service official who was central to that effort, told me he finds it “heartbreaking” to see the work demeaned. “We weren’t making any of this history up,” he said. “We just wanted to share it in a broader and more holistic way.”
The Park Service example illustrates how quickly authoritarian leaders can bend long-established bureaucracies to their will. Since late spring, many park superintendents and historians have followed orders to flag material that might violate the administration’s new standards. As required by Mr. Burgum’s order, signs were posted at historic sites encouraging visitors to report content they considered “negative.”
The flagged items submitted to headquarters this summer reflect the struggle faced by professionals who are committed to truthful curation but also have bills to pay and children to feed. Trump-imposed budget cuts already have forced the agency to shed a quarter of its permanent work force this year.
Among the submissions obtained surreptitiously by the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, was one from the Georgia side of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, where local staff requested “further review of the ‘Causes of the Civil War’ exhibit.” Employees at Great Smoky Mountains National Park cited a panel that referred to the “harsh circumstances of enslavement,” while those at the Washington Monument called out a book that discussed the first president’s slaveholding. And at the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, they flagged half a dozen bookstore offerings, including a pair of autobiographies by enslaved people and a children’s book inspired by the true story of boys who discovered shackles buried on Sullivan’s Island.
In 1822, white officials in Charleston linked the ringleaders of a purported insurrection plot by enslaved people to the church that was Mother Emanuel’s antebellum predecessor. Thirty-five men were executed and the church was destroyed by order of the authorities, the boards probably pried apart by some of the same hands that had nailed them into place. I imagine the distress of some Park Service historians to be not dissimilar, as they are forced to tear down that which they had so conscientiously built.
Mr. Allen, the former parks official, said it felt “tantamount to eradicating the legacy of our nation.”
I take all this a bit personally, of course. It’s not simply that the brand of history I endeavored to write now risks government censorship. The deeper insult I feel is on behalf of those whose stories I and others have documented, and the heirs to their legacies. How much of Mother Emanuel’s story — the story of a racist massacre in a Black church that withstood oppression for two centuries — might Mr. Trump or Mr. Burgum write off as negative or inappropriately disparaging?
A full telling of the rich history of the African diaspora in this country — at times tragic, at others triumphant — is vital to understanding the undulating American narrative. The descendants of the enslaved people who labored on Snee Farm, building the wealth of Charles Pinckney and his young nation, deserve nothing less.
Kevin Sack is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter. He is the author of “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church.”
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