By ELISA TURNER

The National Park Service has recently made concerning changes to some of their web pages— namely, their Underground Railroad page, and their Stonewall monument page. The former has removed a graphic and quote of Harriet Tubman, opting instead to replace these items with USPS stamps touting “black/white cooperation”; the latter has changed the recognized LGBTQ+ acronym to LGB, effectively erasing transgender people from being so much as mentioned on the site.

_{National Park Service website, Underground Railroad page on Jan 21 (top) and March 19 (bottom)}

The Underground Railroad was an organized system of passageways after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passed. It was created and executed to help enslaved people escape slavery. Harriet Tubman was one of the most prevalent conductors, having aided in escape for eight years. “I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger,” said Tubman in 1896. Downgrading her portrait to a stamp and removing her quoted words that used to adorn the top of the page, along with the arguably shady decision to remove any mention of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, is a poor move in editing at best, and erasure at worst.

_{National Park Service website, Stonewall page on Jan 3 (top) and March 19 (bottom)}

The Stonewall Monument is a national monument in New York dedicated to the Stonewall uprising on June 28, 1969– a pivotal moment in queer history and the catalyst of a civil rights movement. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans women of color, are often credited as the first and most impactful individuals to incite the Stonewall uprising. Scrubbing trans people from any sort of mention on the National Park Service website is a disservice to the queer community at large.

Beloit College is a diverse campus, with students of numerous backgrounds and identities coming together to form an apex of multifacetedness. In the face of historical erasure, how exactly will a college of so many cultures be affected?

“Things are easy to destroy, but hard to rebuild,” says Ella Walters’27, secretary of the Spanish Club and staff writer for the Round Table. “When you’re a vulnerable, marginalized community, sometimes you only get so much space, and feels far more scary when you lose that thing, or that thing is threatened, because that can be almost all you have, or a big signifier of what you have,” Walters said in an interview surrounding these erasure-adjacent changes.

Some of these shifty edits are speculated to have been a product of the Trump administration, particularly as a facet of the anti-DEI measures, and the various cuts made against the Department of Education. “In general, the Department of Education had taken a hit, so ALL of history has taken a hit in so many ways, but specifically the history of marginalized communities are taking that hit, and we already are struggling to even carve out space for Black history,” Ella said. “It seems careless, but it’s also, like, probably planned… What is this setting a foundation for, five years down the line?  Because we can think now… right now, they’re removing standards in education. So there’s children who might also get sanitized versions of history, and eventually they will grow up, and you have a generation of people [who] go to these spaces and these places, and you see that they don’t have access to certain aspects of information— and that completely… warps their view of history, of themselves, of the nation, of their feelings… A lot of times when we’re first introduced to things is education… going to these historical places… In subtle ways these changes have this domino effect.”

Walters also expressed sympathy for those struggling to articulate fears that come up in response to both blatant atrocities, and erasure with plausible deniability. “When you see black people… being murdered, when you see trans people being murdered, being degraded, being logic’d away and disgraced or dismissed, it feels like you’re saying— even if it’s not explicitly said— it is… implied in so many ways that those lives do not matter… They do. Those lives definitely do… It’s uncaring, it’s unloving. And even though it may be behind the facade of paragraphs and statements and websites and policy and legal jargon, it is saying something that may be hard to logic, or feel mentally, but you know it… in your feeling, and intuition sometimes, and that’s sometimes really hard to articulate.”

The National Park Service’s changes to their web pages downplay the role of Harriet Tubman, erase trans people entirely from a monument to a movement that could not have even started without them, and reductive oversimplifications of history benefit absolutely no one. Even when fingers have been speculatively pointed at the Trump administration, the motivations for these edits of retroactive censorship are still, largely, unclear.

_{Featured image: RV Business}