Former National Park rangers are organizing a national pushback against an order from President Donald Trump that has stripped dozens of historical exhibits from federal land, launching a public education campaign just as the country prepares to mark its 250th anniversary.
The effort traces back to Elizabeth Kerwin, a former exhibit planner at West Virginia’s Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, who spent years building a memorial highlighting hundreds of enslaved people connected to the site, best known for John Brown’s 1859 raid on a federal armory, reported NPR.
“Instead, the old stone building that was set to house Kerwin’s exhibit has sat empty,” NPR reported. “The door, locked. Its windows boarded up. The only indicator of what might have been is a green sign at the top of the entryway. ‘African-American History,’ it says. The would-be exhibit is one of dozens that were scrubbed from federal land by the Trump administration as the nation prepared to honor the 250th anniversary of the United States.”
The exhibit is one of dozens removed nationwide after Trump signed an executive order calling for “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” which accused critics of pushing a “distorted narrative” that recasts the nation’s legacy as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
In response, Kerwin and other former park employees formed a group called Resistance Rangers, part of a broader coalition known as America 433+. On Juneteenth, they held their first public teach-in at Harpers Ferry, distributing banned pamphlets and discontinued educational booklets to park visitors.
“It’s really disturbing to see that there’s two educational booklets for children from different Black history sites that are no longer being printed,” said Cathy Fulkerson, a 69-year-old visitor from New Hampshire who attended the event.
The National Parks Conservation Association has sued the Department of the Interior over the order, and a federal judge ruled the government must halt further removals and restore exhibits already taken down. U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley ordered 52 items reinstated at more than 30 federal sites by the week of June 22, ahead of the July 4 anniversary. The judge wrote that “history cannot be faithfully told while excluding the experiences of communities” central to the nation’s story.
Affected exhibits span topics including climate change at Glacier National Park, the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, and accounts of slave rebellions and Indigenous massacres.
It remains unclear whether Kerwin’s unopened exhibit will be restored under the ruling. Regardless, the Resistance Rangers say they won’t wait for officials to act. The group plans a national protest this Saturday, gathering signatures for a “declaration of interdependence” supporting safety, dignity, and equal access to opportunity.
For Kerwin, the mission is personal — she hopes her work preserves a fuller national memory for her 13-year-old son and others like him. “They are America,” she said of the previously unnamed enslaved people her research uncovered.
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