A number of events are suing the Nationwide Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Division of the Inside (DOI) over the latest removals of signage commemorating the nation’s historical past of slavery, Civil Rights Motion, Indigenous historical past, and battle for ladies’s and LGBTQIA+ equality.
The plaintiffs are: the Nationwide Parks Conservation Affiliation, American Affiliation for State and Native Historical past, Affiliation of Nationwide Park Rangers, Coalition to Shield America’s Nationwide Parks, Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and Union of Involved Scientists.
The lawsuit was filed on February 17 within the U.S. District Courtroom of Massachusetts. The Gilbert Baker Basis, named after the artist creator of the Delight flag, sued the NPS and DOI in a separate submitting that very same day in Manhattan federal courtroom.
The authorized motion is in response to a Secretary’s Order (SO) issued Might 20, 2025, by U.S. Inside Secretary Doug Burgum, “Restoring Reality and Sanity to American Historical past,” which carried out President Trump’s identically-named government order (EO).
The SO by Burgum ordered the NPS to “take away any content material” within the first 120 days of its issuance that “inappropriately disparages Individuals … [or] emphasizes issues unrelated to the wonder, abundance, or grandeur” of a “pure function” or is in any other case “inconsistent with the needs of” the Restoring Reality and Sanity EO.
In lieu of those reveals and plaques, the SO ordered the NPS to put in “content material that focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American individuals or, with respect to pure options, the wonder, abundance, and grandeur of the American panorama, and is in any other case in step with” the EO.
After Burgum’s SO was rolled out, in June 2025, the NPS was ordered to start compiling a database of reveals and plaques which will warrant elimination per the the order. NPS employees had been required to submit lists of stated contents the next July.
On January 21, a federal order from the White Home started limiting flags at NPS websites. (The federal order was confirmed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.) Correspondence between DOI and NPS officers continued by February, when the primary reveals and plaques began coming down.
The “T” and “Q” had been first eliminated from signage at Manhattan’s Stonewall Nationwide Monument in February 2025. Delight flags had been subsequently taken down from Stonewall one 12 months in a while February 10, 2026. However native activists and metropolis politicians re-raised the Delight flag at Stonewall on February 13.
Different NPS websites the place DOI has eliminated signage since January embody Philadelphia’s Independence Nationwide Historic Park, the place an exhibit was taken down that memorialized the individuals enslaved by President George Washington. A federal decide subsequently ordered the Trump administration to revive the exhibit to its former state.
A plaque commemorating the significance of Cadillac Mountain to the Wabanaki individuals at Maine’s Acadia Nationwide Park has been eliminated per the SO.
Within the Muir Woods at Golden Gate Nationwide Park in California, exhibit signage about Indigenous historical past, ladies’s function within the Muir Woods conservation motion, and the historic function the NPS performed within the eugenics actions was eliminated.
Signage describing local weather threats at Fort Sumter in South Carolina was additionally eliminated. The total listing of desecrated NPS websites might be accessed within the lawsuit.
Plaintiffs are aiming to have all plaques and reveals restored and to bar the DOI from additional desecrating NPS websites.
