It all started with a QR code.
When Gerry James learned this summer that signs had been posted at National Park Service sites encouraging visitors to use a QR code to report information that could be considered “negative about either past or living Americans,” he wanted to change the conservation.
He felt as if the request was another effort by the Trump administration to remove references to Black Americans’ historical achievements from public spaces.
James, who’s the deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign, began to mobilize advocates with a group he’s part of called the Coalition for Outdoor Renaming and Education. The group raises awareness about derogatory place names on public land, and he and members created prompts — such as “stand up for inclusive history” — to help park visitors craft comments to send via that same QR code.
“We’ve turned out thousands of comments, and we’ve FOIA’d for all those materials, too,” said James, who used a federal open records law to request what park visitors wrote. He said that one of the commenters wrote that “history should be told accurately — whether it hurts your snowflake feelings or not.”
National parks have also been instructed to remove items from their gift shops that could be seen as promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion or “specific viewpoints.”
James said that they also penned a letter that included signatures from more than 130 organizations in an effort to speak out against the erosion of history.
He said that he knows that efforts such as this don’t necessarily move the needle, but “ours showed that all sorts of organizations — outdoors, preservation, environmental — care about this issue.”
The majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, believe that factual information at parks shouldn’t be tampered with, according to a new national poll conducted by the National Parks Conservation Association and YouGov, a data analytics company.
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, his administration has sought to purge references to Black history from government spaces, including websites, monuments, and museums.
White House officials contend that such narratives exemplify a “divisive, race-centered ideology,” as Trump wrote in a March executive order, referring to displays at the Smithsonian Institution.
But these efforts haven’t gone unchallenged. For months now, advocates of Black history across the U.S. have been figuring out different ways to draw as much attention as possible to the need to preserve the past, from bringing overlooked history into classrooms to elevating local Black narratives.
James, who’s based in Frankfort, Kentucky, said that he plans to focus on the ongoing need to monitor when information at park sites is removed or altered so that advocates can act accordingly.
“I’m thinking about physical, on-the-ground programs and sustained events that raise the issue of protecting history,” James added. “Then I’m also thinking about just a simple [email list] with the relevant organizations and with people who want to be a part of this effort so that we can organize and rapidly respond.”
Teaching overlooked history in Iowa
Jacqueline Hunter said that the past year has been difficult.
As the former executive director of the African American Museum of Iowa, she said that she’s saddened by the administration’s attacks on educational institutions and spaces that teach about the experiences of Black Americans and other vulnerable groups.
She said that she has seen a decrease, overall, in donor support at the museum. “And to me, that’s personal,” Hunter told Capital B.
Now, she said that in the back of her head, there’s this thought: “Were you supporting us because you supported our mission, or were you supporting us because you were checking off a box?
“That’s a harder pill to swallow,” she said.
Hunter ran the only statewide museum in Iowa dedicated to protecting Black history and culture. She said that, given everything that has happened this year, she and the museum’s staff have had to become even more intentional about their outreach, adding that they know that “the message that comes from us is an important one.”
Fewer students are visiting — a result of funding challenges within education and the hostile political environment, she said. In response, the staff have reworked the delivery of information. An educator was recently hired to help with virtual programming and increase the offerings that could be shared with classrooms if students aren’t able to visit in person.
Even with the pressures facing museums, Hunter wants the public to understand the rich Black history of the state.
It includes the story of an enslaved man named Ralph whose struggle for freedom anticipated questions that would later arise in the Dred Scott case, Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to the state to push for Black equality, and former President Barack Obama’s triumph in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus that was fueled by young organizers and was a big first step in his history-making run for the White House.
“The only time the Midwest comes up in Black history is when we talk about the Great Migration, and the focus is usually on Chicago, Detroit, and maybe Milwaukee,” Hunter said. “We miss that there are Black Americans to the west of the Mississippi — and those stories are important and foundational.”
Remaining on the alert in Pennsylvania
For Michael Coard, this year has been about staying ready.
Coard, who’s an attorney, is the founding member of the Philadelphia-based Avenging the Ancestors Coalition. The organization is a group of advocates and scholars that led a successful yearslong campaign to erect a slavery memorial at the city’s President’s House in the early 2000s.
When Trump issued his “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order in March, Coard saw it as a warning shot. Then in May came an order that called for the review of “any public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that have been “removed or changed from January 1, 2020.”
At least 13 display panels at the President’s House, only steps from the Liberty Bell, were flagged as possibly needing revision. This means that they could be severely edited, whitewashed, or completely removed, Coard said.
“There wasn’t much activism going on regarding historical sites in the U.S., and certainly nothing here in Philadelphia,” Coard said. “But once [Trump] did what he did, we got folks from all cross sections of Philadelphia society — archeologists, architects, preservationists, historians, tour guides — to come together.”
He said that the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition is the activist arm of an umbrella group called the President’s House and Slavery Memorial Alliance. He said that the organization has political and legal arms to conduct outreach to elected officials and help with any litigation.
Members met in November to discuss strategy and bring community members up to date on the issue.
“We have a multipronged approach,” Coard said. “[Trump] poked the bear, and now we’re responding by doing stuff to get the word out and raise hell.”
Reclaiming stories in Louisiana
This year has been an object lesson in the importance of telling your own story, at least for twin sisters Jo and Joy Banner.
The Banners live in Wallace, Louisiana, a town that was established by Black pro-Union Army soldiers during the Civil War and is now in what’s called Cancer Alley, a stretch of land where clusters of chemical plants and oil refineries have been linked to illnesses among the predominantly Black residents.
Their family lineage includes enslaved people on local plantations. The tumult of this year has fortified their resolve not only to fight against industry, but also to buy back plantations where their forebears were enslaved so that they can preserve Black history.
They founded the Descendants Project in 2021. The nonprofit organization trains its attention on supporting formerly enslaved communities on the Gulf Coast and fighting climate change, with a stated commitment to “intergenerational healing and flourishing.”
“The first time [enslaved Africans] were brought here was a ripping away of their history, a taking away of their names and their culture,” Jo Banner previously told Capital B.
In October 2024, before Trump returned to office, the National Park Service concluded in a report that an 11-mile stretch of the Great River Road in St. John the Baptist Parish — where Wallace is located — nourished “a sense of the feeling of living and working in the plantation system in the American South.”
But then, in February, once Trump was back in the White House, the agency pulled the area from being considered for National Historic Landmark designation. Many view this reversal as part of a wider pattern of erasure — a pattern that the Banner sisters said that they hope to quash by keeping Black history front and center.
“This year has been one of the scariest years, because we have an administration that’s made anyone fighting to protect their health or their happiness an enemy,” Banner told Capital B. “But I’ve used the insight [from this year] to think about: How can we be there for the community?”
The sisters, who are the first Black owners of Woodland Plantation, recently screened a documentary there. But they didn’t show the film, Gaslight, on an actual projector screen. Instead, they showed it on a plantation wall that needs a bit of repair; Banner said that it has some grit and texture to it.
“It didn’t really hit me until afterward how powerful that moment was,” Banner said. “Not only were we telling our own stories. We were placing them on the wall of a plantation.
“It became this whole art piece. It was more than just us watching a movie.”