On Thursday, as we celebrated the day justice was finally served for NAACP leader Medgar Evers, who was murdered outside his home in 1936, reports surfaced of the National Park Service allegedly removing visitor brochures from the home to make edits.
However, hours after news broke of these changes, Park Service officials told Mississippi Today that the pamphlets had been returned to the home. According to the agency, the brochures were removed because they were “outdated.”
However, as previously reported by theGrio, Park Service officials reported that content handed out to visitors would be edited to remove the word “racist” used to describe Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist with affiliations to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council, who shot Evers in the back outside his home. Additionally, details about Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot were also reportedly going to be removed.
“It’s turning the assassination of Medgar Evers into something that is bloodless and had no impact. We can talk about him being a wonderful veteran, but not about what it cost him. He gave the last full measure of devotion, and now we want to ignore that,” Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, said of the reported change.
“He was a first-class racist, and there’s no way you can get around it,” Professor Leslie Burl McLemore told Mississippi Today. “He assassinated a man and then bragged about it.”
Similarly, Evers’ niece and Hinds County Supervisor Wanda Evers noted, “You can take away the brochures, but the one thing you can’t take away is history.”
Though Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute and daughter of Myrlie and Medgar, said “the final product has not been put out yet,” members around the country rallied to preserve the truthful telling of Evers’ death. So much so that U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson submitted a letter to the National Park Service seeking clarity on what happened.
The public outrage over the reported changes comes as communities witness an increasing number of companies and national monuments revisiting and attempting to rewrite Black history, in accordance with the Trump administration’s direction.
In March 2025, Trump signed the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, which aimed at revising the perpetuation of “a false reconstruction of American history.” In the weeks that followed, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum released his own orders for agencies to remove “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus 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.”
“Some materials may be edited or replaced to provide broader context, others may remain unchanged, and some removals being cited publicly had nothing to do with [the order] at all. Claims that parks are erasing history or removing signs wholesale are inaccurate,” Park Service said, per the outlet.
