By Audrey Peterman
Since Friday multiple people sent me this story, National parks cut free entry for MLK Day, add Trump’s birthday. I shared it on social media with a post explaining that I am not at all disturbed by this development and see that it could mark a turning point.
The President is going out of his way to gut an honor for a bona fide hero and Nobel Prize Winner to give it to himself, the recipient of a “FIFA Peace Award.” Ending fee-free day to the National Parks for Dr. King’s birthday and Juneteenth is an act of racial animus with which no American president should every align himself.
We know that the president and his ilk are so insecure that they’re trying to wipe out Black Americans from history, which is impossible. No doubt they’re hoping we’ll be outraged so they can feed on more pain. But we should not give them the satisfaction.
Instead, we can joyfully, gloriously embrace the National Park System – on those days in particular – because guess what? Of the 433 units of the system comprising nature parks, historic sites, monuments, battlefields and seashores, LESS THAN 100 CHARGE ENTRANCE FEES! So it’s incredibly easy for us to show how we really feel about efforts to erase us.
For 30 year my husband Frank and I and many others have pointed out that the entire history of Black, Brown, and White America is in the National Park System. Many people think “park” just means playground, but in fact the national parks are like the veins that carry the blood of history and memory from antiquity until now through our body politic.
There is Earth in the parks untouched since the first elements of fire, air, water and earth formed this continent. They include the communities left by ancient indigenous people at the Badlands, Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon National Parks; the Europeans’ arrival at Jamestown and the landing of the first Africans traded into enslavement at Fort Monroe National Monument.
From the place where the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in Boston National Historical Park to the surrender of Cornwallis’ British army at Yorktown Battlefield; from the drafting and issuing of the Constitution at Independence Hall; from the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumpter to the rebel army’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; from the Women’s Suffrage Movement at Belmont-Paul to the Civil Rights Movement’s Selma to Montgomery Trail; from the Trail of Tears that indigenous people were forced to travel; Japanese Internment camps at Manzanar to the rights of LGBTQ people at Stonewall Inn, the National Park System contains so many more of the places where history was made.
I firmly believe that the fact that many people do not know these places exist, or that they can visit them and learn the story where it happened and how all of us have ancestors that contributed greatly to the development of our country, is the real reason we can be so easily manipulated and divided.
Let’s use the president’s attempted insult to our benefit. Let’s all go out and experience our history, and take our children and grandchildren so it is cemented in their experience and carried forward. We can make it EXACTLY the opposite effect of what he intended.
I’m so happy to see groups such as Black Hikers Unite already organizing on Facebook. Check out NPS.gov and find a park near you to GO!
(Audrey Peterman is an author and advocate for National Parks and Diversity since 1995. Audrey@audreypeterman.com)