Multiple parties are suing the National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) over the recent removals of signage commemorating the country’s history of slavery, Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous history, and struggle for women’s and LGBTQIA+ equality.
The plaintiffs are: 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 lawsuit was filed on February 17 in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. The Gilbert Baker Foundation, named after the artist creator of the Pride flag, sued the NPS and DOI in a separate filing that same day in Manhattan federal court.
The legal action is in response to a Secretary’s Order (SO) issued May 20, 2025, by U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which implemented President Trump’s identically-named executive order (EO).
The SO by Burgum ordered the NPS to “remove any content” in the first 120 days of its issuance that “inappropriately disparages Americans … [or] emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur” of a “natural feature” or is otherwise “inconsistent with the purposes of” the Restoring Truth and Sanity EO.
In lieu of these exhibits and plaques, the SO ordered the NPS to install “content that focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape, and is otherwise consistent with” the EO.
After Burgum’s SO was rolled out, in June 2025, the NPS was ordered to begin compiling a database of exhibits and plaques that may warrant removal per the the order. NPS staff were required to submit lists of said contents the following July.
On January 21, a federal order from the White House began restricting flags at NPS sites. (The federal order was confirmed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.) Correspondence between DOI and NPS officials continued through February, when the first exhibits and plaques started coming down.
The “T” and “Q” were first removed from signage at Manhattan’s Stonewall National Monument in February 2025. Pride flags were subsequently taken down from Stonewall one year later on February 10, 2026. But local activists and city politicians re-raised the Pride flag at Stonewall on February 13.
Other NPS sites where DOI has removed signage since January include Philadelphia’s Independence National Historic Park, where an exhibit was taken down that memorialized the people enslaved by President George Washington. A federal judge subsequently ordered the Trump administration to restore the exhibit to its former state.
A plaque commemorating the importance of Cadillac Mountain to the Wabanaki people at Maine’s Acadia National Park has been removed per the SO.
In the Muir Woods at Golden Gate National Park in California, exhibit signage about Indigenous history, women’s role in the Muir Woods conservation movement, and the historical role the NPS played in the eugenics movements was removed.
Signage describing climate threats at Fort Sumter in South Carolina was also removed. The full list of desecrated NPS sites can be accessed in the lawsuit.
Plaintiffs are aiming to have all plaques and exhibits restored and to bar the DOI from further desecrating NPS sites.
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