I was a National Park Ranger for 32 years and Now I’m Speaking Out About Censorship

Last year, the Department of the Interior ordered National Park Service employees to scour parks for “inappropriate content,” defined as anything that “disparages Americans past or living.” Rangers like myself were mandated to report content to be evaluated for “conformance” with the order. Just months into the new Administration, I was stunned to see the brochure I worked on appear in a leaked database of exhibits, signs, brochures, and videos that the NPS is considering for censorship. 

The park official who reported it conceded that the quotes were “true” and accurate, but argued that the brochure violated one of the implicit goals of the order: to prevent historic sites from telling the full truth about enslavement and racism. This park official seemed eager to comply. “If it needs to be changed,” the official concluded, “we can just remove this text box.”

The 2024 brochure is the kind of accurate historical interpretation that NPS used to pride itself on. Just four years earlier, the agency was signing a different tune in making a concerted effort to spotlight sites and moments in history to better fight injustice and ensure inequity as well as make the parks more accessible to everyone. 

The brochure fulfills NPS’s mission to preserve our nation’s heritage and educate visitors about our history.  All NPS signs, databases and archives are grounded in rigorous scholarship and feature primary sources—in this case, direct quotes from Confederate leaders about the true cause of the Civil War. Under the current Administration, this scholarship is clearly under threat. 

This is just one example of endangered history in the National Park Service. Similar scenes are playing out across the nation’s 433 NPS sites. The leaked data revealed that while thousands of pieces of content were submitted for review, the formal determination process as to whether each submission was in or out of conformance is opaque. The public, and even most NPS employees, have never seen the details of this process, despite repeated calls for the US Department of the Interior (DOI) and NPS to disclose this information.  

The Erasure of Our History 

Slavery, declared the Vice President of the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” “True,” noted an official at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in 2025, “but is this considered cherry picking and denigrating Southerners?” 

This startling comment demonstrates the kind of self-censorship and revisionist history national parks and our federal institutions are dealing with. 

The language of the administration’s orders is vague: what does “disparaging” even mean?  And which Americans should be protected from disparagement? The intent is clear. The Administration seeks to erase Black history, women’s history, LGBTQ history, Indigenous and immigration history—even though the United States is a nation of immigrants and every single one of the 433 National Park sites is on Indigenous land. 

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The current administration’s purge of federal workers pushed me into an early retirement last year. Harpers Ferry is a monumental site that holds within it the breadth of the African American story--from the days of surviving enslavement in an English colony through US school desegregation. It is the only site where a multi-racial group of abolitionists took up arms to end US slavery.

 “John Brown [a radical abolitionist] did not only capture and hold Harpers Ferry for twenty hours, but he held the whole South,” said Osborne Perry Anderson, 1861. John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry was a turning point of the abolitionist movement and a crucial history that the American public deserves to know. For too long, though, the park’s signs and tours downplayed Black history and the abolitionist movement while emphasizing Civil War battles to reinforce the “Lost Cause” myth of Civil War history. These sanitized stories focus on battle maneuvers and “good slave” narratives, allowing the NPS and visitors to avoid the discomfort of exploring the brutality of slavery and the other systemic injustices.

Where Black history did appear at Harpers Ferry, park neglect has undermined it. The “Black Voices” exhibit has been closed since 2019 because park leadership failed to ensure basic maintenance to protect it from mold and water damage. Then, leadership failed again to provide sufficient funding for replacement exhibits.

Despite these challenges, dedicated colleagues, community partners, and I pushed back against narratives that glorified the Confederacy. We struggled to place Black history where it belongs: at the center of Harpers Ferry’s story. Despite a severe lack of funding, I pushed ahead with plans for a replacement exhibit for the damaged “Black Voices” gallery.

I recalled advice I had been given when I first arrived at Harpers Ferry: to ignore the account of the sole surviving Black participant, an abolitionist named Osborne Perry Anderson, who escaped to Canada and published the only first-hand account of the infamous raid. I had been told that Anderson’s work was not “reliable,” but like any primary source, it simply requires context and remains an essential piece of evidence that was being overlooked. I decided to buck this recommendation and feature Anderson’s words for the first time at the park. The design quoted Anderson on his fellow Black abolitionists, who joined Brown’s mission and whose stories had been downplayed and neglected.

Exhibit research also uncovered the names of hundreds of enslaved people whose stories ran through Harpers Ferry from colonial days to the beginning of the United States and through the end of legal slavery. To honor them, I worked with an exhibit designer to plan a memorial wall displaying these names across that same period. The new exhibit also updated the park's approach to Black History. The previous exhibit, while groundbreaking in its time, told the African American story from a white perspective. In contrast, the new exhibit sought to let Black people tell their own story and cast them as the main characters in their own narratives.

A new Freedom Wall featured five Black abolitionists who fought with John Brown. The use of "Black Abolitionist" instead of "Black Raiders" was suggested by the local African American History Association. Before this revision, all of those who participated with Brown were labeled simply as "raiders,” again reflecting a white establishment point of view. Osborne Anderson, the only surviving Black abolitionist, tells the story of the action and his compatriots in his own words.

Major themes in African American history were painstakingly researched and connected to the area's history, including pre-revolutionary enslavement, universal education, Reconstruction, and the pushback against Reconstruction—Jim Crow. The exhibit timeline extended from the 1500s to 2016 with the centennial anniversary of the Niagara Movement meeting at Harpers Ferry in 1916.

At the time of my retirement, the exhibit project was on track to open this summer for the 250th anniversary of this nation. But today, amidst the racist censorship our nation is facing, the exhibit sits closed and dark. Its future remains uncertain. Despite this Administration's actions, Americans don’t like censorship as tens of thousands of comments made that clear.

Late last week, a federal judge ordered the Administration to restore all content that was removed from national parks site be restored ahead of the July 4th holiday. The 63 page ruling explicitly states  “Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.” While DOI and NPS have filed an appeal to stop the order, this give me hope that our history will be protected. 

Education and language around slavery and the Civil War have been evolving and over the last few years the National Park Service was starting to make real strides toward tangible progress in sharing the agency’s role in upholding systemic racism. Now, that progress is slipping away, and will disappear entirely if we don’t act. Without public attention and pushback, the stories and legacies of the brave individuals and movements might disappear again from the park’s story, and eventually from public memory. We cannot let this happen.