A portrait and quote of Harriet Tubman, the heroic spy who guided hundreds of enslaved people to safety, has been restored to a National Park Service website after a brief, but loud, hiatus.
An icon of Black American history, Tubman was downplayed on the webpage in a series of deletions and edits to emphasize the collaboration between Black and white Americans to run the Underground Railroad, according to a review of web archives by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The Tubman revisions were among dozens of instances of NPS changing the text of historical pages about Black history in this country, which was first reported by The Washington Post. The edits sparked an outcry Monday, with critics accusing the Trump administration of sanitizing America’s history of systemic racism.
The Trump administration initially defended the changes, but Monday night reported the original website had been restored and dismissed Tubman’s removal as an unauthorized edit.
