Harriet Tubman’s Image Returned to National Park Service Website

Pressure works, y’all.

After the people said, “You will not play with the good sister Harriet Tubman in this way,” the National Park Service backtracked and returned her image and quotes to the Underground Railroad page on its website. 

Because it is under the guidance of the dumbest administration to ever administrate, the National Park Service appeared to reduce its diversity, equity, and inclusion footprint by trying to separate Harriet Tubman from the Underground Railroad. What the National Park Service didn’t know is that you can’t take clouds from the sky or chocolate out of the milk. Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad go together. There is no one without the other. 

Because no one was in the office to say, “You are trying to do what? Yeah, that’s not going to go over well,” the agency replaced images of Tubman with some civil rights stamps, and Black America said, “What you aren’t going to do is erase Harriet Tubman’s legacy from a government website that we’ve never been to. Not on our watch!”

The National Park Service claims the changes were made without approval from the top leadership, but I don’t know what that means. Does that mean that the Trump administration didn’t approve the changes or that the brass at the National Park Service didn’t approve the changes?

Either way, they’re lying. Fine, I don’t know if they’re lying, but we all know that President Trump and his wayward band of racists have been hell bent on the erasure of Black people from websites. In fact, federal websites have faced the brunt of the Trump administration’s racism. From Trump’s first day in office, they looked to remove all mention of Black triumph. They removed Jackie Robinson’s Army history from the Dept. of Defense’s website, the FBI painted over a diversity wall that included such divisive words like,  “fairness” “respect” and “compassion”, they even forced Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to get rid of the “Black Lives Matter” mural after threatening to withhold funding. 

From CNN:

Until mid-February, the top of the NPS’ “What is the Underground Railroad?” page featured a large photo of Tubman, the railroad’s most famous “conductor,” records from the Wayback Machine show. Next to it was a quote from Tubman about her experience coordinating the clandestine network for slaves seeking freedom.

But sometime in February it was changed, swapping the large image of Tubman for small commemorative stamps of five abolitionists – among them Tubman – a screen grab from the webpage on March 19 captured by the Wayback Machine shows. Text on the stamps touted “Black/White Cooperation.” Tubman’s quote was removed and the text amended significantly in the updated version.

The CNN notes that the webpage was edited to push the mention of slavery way down to the third paragraph and completely removed a reference to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. NPS also changed a description of how slaves worked to free themselves from slavery to two paragraphs on “American ideals of liberty and freedom.”

But NPS, we see y’all. Before they changed the webpage back to the original Tubman text they defended the changes claiming “the idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false and belies the extensive websites, social media posts, and programs we offer about Harriet Tubman specifically and Black History as a whole,” an NPS spokesperson told CNN.

“The National Park Service recognizes Harriet Tubman as the Underground Railroad’s best known conductor and we celebrate her as a deeply spiritual woman who lived her ideals and dedicated her life to freedom,” the NPS said.

I don’t know who needs to tell Porsha Williams, but Tubman was not an actual conductor, and the Underground Railroad was not an actual train. The Underground Railroad was a series of…forget it. 

See why DEI is important? 

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