By Gwen R
Last Monday, August 25th, over 200 community members gathered on the Richmond waterfront outside the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park visitor center to denounce the Trump regime’s efforts to whitewash our shared history and defund our national parks.
The event coincided with a national day of action on the 109th birthday of the National Park Service and drew extensive local and even international media coverage (see here, here, and, for German speakers, here).
Attendees carried signs, wrote postcards, signed a giant birthday card (created by IEB member Nicola G), and shared their stories with a videography team (IEB members Joey K and Lucy B) to underscore how important it is to tell our history as it truly is: a complex interweaving of multiple voices engaged in the long, difficult effort to realize our nation’s promise for all people. Members of IEB’s visibility brigade spelled out “Protect Our Parks” in huge letters and chalked a giant message in front of the visitor center (thanks, Maria S and Jess B). IEB’s Joan C greeted and directed the crowd.
The event, co-sponsored by IEB, the Contra Costa Japanese American Citizens League, Tsuru for Solidarity, Richmond Indivisible, and the National Parks Conservation Association, featured impassioned speakers with a variety of viewpoints on truth-telling at the national parks generally and at the Rosie the Riveter park specifically.
The Rosie the Riveter Park, established in 2000, focuses not just on Richmond’s role in building victory ships for the war effort, but also on stories of people fighting for their rights and freedoms on the home front, including incarcerated Japanese Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, and Black Americans facing housing discrimination. This inclusive story-telling puts the park on a collision course with Trump’s executive order from March which aims to sanitize how history is told at our national parks and museums.
Donna Graves, the local historian (and IEB member) who helped found the Rosie the Riveter park and who organized the event, said: “This park stands in sharp contrast to the oversimplified and whitewashed version of U.S. history that the current administration is demanding from the Park Service. Here in Richmond, the stories of many communities are illuminated, because the only way to tell the history of such a big and complex nation is through multiple perspectives.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher as white Christian nationalist power is ascendant. As Richmond City Council member Doria Robinson explained to the crowd, “We’re in this really, really, incredibly important moment where we’re defining who is and who is not American, who is and who is not included in our story. We are being called, in my opinion, to act out of love and courage, to demand that we embrace this complex ‘we.’ ”
Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service from 2009-2016, concurred. “When the administration says, ‘We want you to shut the hell up,’ they’re basically telling the community to shut up, and they’re telling this community… that they don’t count, their history is not relevant.”
Retired National Park Service employee and event emcee Naomi Torres said that telling the multifaceted stories of American history, “the good and the bad and the shameful,” is the only way to avoid repeating them today. “We cannot move forward as a country unless we think critically about our past and our future,” she said.
Flora Ninomiya, who was incarcerated as a child during World War II along with 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, drove the point home by connecting her family’s history with the Trump regime’s terrorizing of immigrants today. “We have to know our history, what happened in the past. We can’t keep making the same mistakes, which is what we’re doing now,” she said.
A full, truthful telling of American history is essential to our fight for a free and just future. Trump’s attacks on our parks and museums must be met with swift, unified resistance. Let’s keep the pressure on!
Take action against the whitewashing of our nation’s history
Indivisible National’s Black, Indigenous, People of Color [BIPOC] Caucus is calling on the leadership of the Smithsonian to stand strong against the regime’s demand for censorship. Sign this letter urging the Smithsonian museums to reject the administration’s demands and defend America’s history from tyrannical censorship.
Use this script from 5calls.org to demand that your members of Congress push back against the regime’s “reviews” of federal agencies and institutions to ensure their work sufficiently aligns with Trump’s white supremacist world view.
