Trump administration reveals list of National Park Service civil rights removals

The Trump administration has now put numbers on a fight over who controls the nation’s public memory on federal land: at least 51 National Park Service exhibits were removed from 37 sites, including climate-change signs, civil-rights materials and slavery-related content. The inventory, filed in court, shows the removals reached parks and monuments from Acadia National Park in Maine to the President’s House in Philadelphia.

The list came after U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston ordered the government to identify what had been taken so she could measure the scope of the dispute. Kelley directed the Interior Department to restore interpretive materials altered or removed since May 20, 2025, within three weeks, a deadline that would have the work done before the July 4, 2026 semiquincentennial celebration. The department said restoring the materials by July 3 would be a “herculean and unmanageable task,” and it has appealed.

The removals were carried out under President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” along with a related Interior Department directive telling the Park Service to remove or alter material that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” That language has become the fault line in a broader contest over interpretation on public land, with critics saying the administration is sanitizing history and supporters arguing the parks should present a less partisan account.

Among the examples identified were climate-change signs at Acadia National Park and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York, civil-rights materials at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and at Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, slavery-related material at the President’s House in Philadelphia, and women’s-rights material at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Gateway National Recreation Area. An exhibit at Independence National Historical Park describing George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people was also removed. Visitors to those sites are no longer seeing interpretive panels that connected the landscape to the nation’s struggles over race, gender and environmental harm.

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of six organizations: the National Parks Conservation Association, American Association for State and Local History, Association of National Park Rangers, Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Society for Experiential Graphic Design and Union of Concerned Scientists. The National Park Service has long said its historians study and document civil rights stories across the country, and the clash now puts that educational mission squarely against a White House effort to recast what belongs in the national story ahead of America 250.