Groups sue National Park Service over signage removal

A number of events are suing the Nationwide Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Division of the Inside (DOI) over the current removals of signage commemorating the nation’s historical past of slavery, Civil Rights Motion, Indigenous historical past, and battle for girls’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 Court docket of Massachusetts. The Gilbert Baker Basis, named after the artist creator of the Satisfaction 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 Could 20, 2025, by U.S. Inside Secretary Doug Burgum, “Restoring Reality and Sanity to American Historical past,” which applied President Trump’s identically-named govt 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 People … [or] emphasizes issues unrelated to the sweetness, abundance, or grandeur” of a “pure characteristic” or is in any other case “inconsistent with the needs of” the Restoring Reality and Sanity EO.

In lieu of those displays 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 folks or, with respect to pure options, the sweetness, abundance, and grandeur of the American panorama, and is in any other case according to” the EO.

After Burgum’s SO was rolled out, in June 2025, the NPS was ordered to start compiling a database of displays and plaques which will warrant removing per the the order. NPS workers had been required to submit lists of stated contents the next July.

On January 21, a federal order from the White Home started proscribing flags at NPS websites. (The federal order was confirmed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.) Correspondence between DOI and NPS officers continued by means of February, when the primary displays and plaques began coming down.

The “T” and “Q” had been first faraway from signage at Manhattan’s Stonewall Nationwide Monument in February 2025. Satisfaction flags had been subsequently taken down from Stonewall one yr afterward February 10, 2026. However native activists and metropolis politicians re-raised the Satisfaction flag at Stonewall on February 13.

Different NPS websites the place DOI has eliminated signage since January embrace Philadelphia’s Independence Nationwide Historic Park, the place an exhibit was taken down that memorialized the folks 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 folks 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, girls’s position within the Muir Woods conservation motion, and the historic position 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 record of desecrated NPS websites might be accessed within the lawsuit.

Plaintiffs are aiming to have all plaques and displays restored and to bar the DOI from additional desecrating NPS websites.