It’s not easy, but please look at the photograph accompanying this editorial. It shows a formerly enslaved man in Louisiana displaying whipping scars on his back during the Civil War.
Made in May 1863 and widely published two months later, it presented gruesome evidence of slavery’s inhumanity for countless Americans who didn’t necessarily comprehend it before. It has been credited with helping coalesce support for the defeat of the Confederacy and ultimately ending slavery.
More than 160 years later, the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see it.
Bowing to President Donald Trump’s pernicious campaign to recast America’s history through a rose-colored MAGA lens, the National Park Service recently removed the iconic image, titled “The Scourged Back,” from Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia.
It’s part of a wider effort to scrub national park sites of materials that promote “corrosive ideology” — which this corrosive administration apparently defines as any reference to slavery, Native American policy and other sins of the nation’s past.
Trump’s authoritarian obsession with commandeering America’s cultural institutions is bad enough when it takes the form of, say, demolishing the artistic value and stature of the Kennedy Center.
But the administration’s zeal to sanitize history as it relates to slavery and the Civil War is singularly noxious. Along with bizarre moves to restore Confederate monuments and military base names (what other nation lionizes a vanquished military enemy?), it attempts to minimize the horror and modern societal relevance of what has aptly been called America’s “original sin.”
When you consider the towering role that strained race relations plays in our national life to this day, it’s clear we are still reckoning with the lingering effects of that sin. But this administration — which likes to pretend, ludicrously, that Black Americans don’t still face racist barriers to success in our society — wants to wave slavery away like it never happened.
And they’re not even doing it openly. The Parks Service purge of unpleasant historical facts wasn’t publicly announced, but was instead uncovered by The Washington Post.
The newspaper reports that the removal of the photo and other materials from multiple Park Service sites was in response to Trump’s executive order from May to scrub material deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans.”
Among materials slapped with the Orwellian designation of being “out of compliance” with Trump’s edict are displays at Harper’s Ferry related to the 1859 anti-slavery raid led by the abolitionist John Brown. Also targeted is the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, based on the undisputed but apparently inconvenient fact that George Washington kept slaves there.
Why does all this matter in 2025? Because, as The Post reports, the Parks Service is broadly interpreting Trump’s order as applying to such currently relevant topics as racism, sexism and gay rights. As it inevitably must, if the goal is to ignore any societal conflict that might “disparage” American culture.
America’s founding phrase “All men are created equal” wasn’t actualized (even within its own limited construct) when it was written. To the extent that it has become more so today, it’s because we as a nation have, in a continuing if sporadic process, recognized and addressed the shortcomings of our national reality in comparison to our stated ideals. Regarding not just race but religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation and other topics, we gradually move closer to realizing that lofty goal.
That process can only continue working when we look at ourselves and our history clearly — scars and all.
