Hands Off Our History

In August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before an audience of 250,000 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to speak to the heart and soul of the nation. He told his audience about a dream. Perhaps more significantly, he spoke about the promissory note the country had written to Black Americans; a check he noted wryly and with pronounced sorrow that remained uncashed due to insufficient funds.

Those insufficient funds were based on the idea — the promise rooted marrow-deep in our collective heritage — that all men, all people, were created equal. And that Black people deserved equality before the law, the right to vote, and an end to segregation, Jim Crow and racial violence.

King’s dream was firmly rooted to American history. He opened his remarks with a direct reference to President Abraham Lincoln who had “five score years ago” issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He closed with a reference to Stone Mountain in Georgia, the birthplace of the renewed Klan in 1915 and, at the time of King’s speech, an emerging shrine to the values of insurrection and white supremacy.

Although King never made historic preservation an integral part of his equity and justice work — he was too busy making history to advocate for it — one area of progress toward the equality he dreamed of has come through the broadening in recent years of our shared national narrative to include more of our stories and voices.

The National Park Service, the nation’s leading storyteller, has played a mighty role in helping the public to understand the struggles, the losses and the victories that Americans from diverse backgrounds have contributed to the development and the advancement of this nation. Today, rangers at the Lincoln Memorial show visitors where King stood on that fateful day and teach them about the monumental historical impact of his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Our national parks did not always lean towards inclusivity. Some argue they still don’t.

Yet, two-thirds of the current National Park System consists of historic and cultural sites that run the gamut from Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, DC, to Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in the Bay Area. More than 30 Park Service sites ranging from Fort Davis in West Texas to the Maggie Walker home in Richmond, Virginia, are known as African American experience sites. In Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park protects the historic church where Dr. King preached. And recent additions to the National Park System like the Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas, and the Stonewall Inn in lower Manhattan have increased the breadth and depth of the stories our national parks tell and the people they represent. 

This is progress. Or it was …

Sadly, budgets and policies are now being proposed or enacted that would dismantle our national parks and force the Park Service to abandon nearly two-thirds of the sites currently in their system. The president’s skinny budget proposal explicitly calls for the Park Service to give up our smaller national park sites, which includes many of our nation’s historic sites.

The premise is outrageous. After all, was Paul Revere’s famous ride any less historically significant and valuable because it was only around fifteen miles long? No. Some national park sites may be small in size but mighty in the history they protect.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of those national park sites were enacted through acts of Congress, and the administration cannot unilaterally cede control of them or transfer them to the states. That is illegal.

But more than that, it’s wrong. Those favoring such wholesale dismantling claim that our national parks have exceeded their mission, which they view quite narrowly as being limited to natural resource protection (except where deposits of oil, gas and rare earth minerals might be underfoot) and the occasional mention of men on horseback, preferably with guns and swords drawn. This is not true.

What they miss is that accurate, just and inclusive storytelling is a civil rights issue. By ensuring that our national parks tell the stories of all Americans, we help ensure that the people, places and threads too long overlooked or deliberately ignored are at long last being incorporated into our shared national narrative. This is how we put some money in that underfunded account. This is how we cash Dr. King’s promissory note.

Our national parks help us to remember our history. When necessary, they allow us to confront our past. They provide us with the opportunity to acknowledge the times when, as a nation, we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature and through that acknowledgment bind up our wounds, heal and then together strive for greatness.

The administration cannot unilaterally cede control of park sites or transfer them to the states. That is illegal. But more than that, it’s wrong.

So, we need to see the ongoing effort to reduce the size of the National Park Service for exactly what it is. This is a deliberate attempt to excise from our National Park System and our national conscience the voices and the stories of Black and brown folks, women, and Native, Indigenous and LGBTQ peoples.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Congress funds the National Park Service budget and is not bound by the president’s disastrous proposal. This is our chance to hold the line for our history and continue to defend every single national park site that the administration would shamefully try to erase from the map. Together, we must speak in one voice, calling for the Trump administration to keep its hands off our history.