HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — On a sun-drenched Juneteenth afternoon, former National Park Service employees set up tables along the historic main street of Harpers Ferry, offering banned booklets and “junior Resistance Ranger” badges to tourists. The pop-up teach-in was the launch of a summer-long campaign by a group of ex-rangers calling themselves the Resistance Rangers, who say they are filling a void left by the Trump administration’s removal of historically accurate exhibits from national parks.
The event came a week after U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley of Massachusetts ordered the government to cease removing historical materials from national parks and restore those already removed. Kelley wrote that “history cannot be faithfully told while excluding the experiences of communities whose contributions, struggles, and achievements form an important part of our Nation’s story.” The order covers 52 items at more than 30 federal sites, including artifacts from the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail and exhibits on climate change at Glacier National Park, and gives the Department of the Interior a deadline before July 4 to comply.
At Harpers Ferry, the Resistance Rangers targeted their message to the very audience a canceled Black history exhibit was meant to reach. Former park ranger Elizabeth Kerwin, 58, had spent years building a wall of remembrance highlighting hundreds of enslaved people with ties to the site, best known for abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid. The exhibit was to open in an old stone building near the historic armory. Instead, the building sits empty, its door locked, its windows boarded up. A green sign reading “African-American History” marks the spot.
“The people who were overlooked and unnamed and didn’t count in the official record, they deserve to take up space in our national memory,” Kerwin told the crowd. “They are America.”
The exhibit’s cancellation began after Trump signed a 2025 executive order aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” The order directed federal sites to remove content that it said replaced “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” Conservation and advocacy groups sued the Department of the Interior, and the legal fight reached Kelley’s court.
The Resistance Rangers formed as an offshoot of the broader America 433+ coalition — named for the 433 sites in the National Park System — to protest the removals and educate the public. They chose Juneteenth, the federal holiday marking the end of slavery, to launch their effort. “The only way that change has ever happened in this country is through a small, committed group of American citizens working really hard,” said Melissa Dalley, a former park guide at the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site and a Resistance Ranger. “What we’re doing out here is trying to recruit those people into that citizen army.”
Visitors to the park on Juneteenth walked past the shuttered building to find a table with copies of discontinued children’s workbooks, banned books, and wooden badges for those willing to take a pledge to “protect our parks, history and science by speaking up, learning and sharing the full stories of our national parks.”
Cathy Fulkerson, 69, a visitor from New Hampshire, said the display moved her. “It’s really disturbing to see that there’s two educational booklets for children from different Black history sites that are no longer being printed because of our government’s decision to support racism instead of justice and liberty for all,” she said.
Kerwin’s database of enslaved people — compiled over years with colleagues — includes the account of Osborne Perry Anderson, the lone surviving Black member of John Brown’s raid. The park now offers a QR code linking to a five-paragraph overview of the site’s African American history. That, Kerwin said, is not enough.
During her speech, Kerwin’s 13-year-old son, Daniel Nisbett, stepped to her side. She had told the crowd earlier that her son was “foremost in my heart” as she worked on the exhibit. “I hoped he would see strength and resilience in that story,” she said.
Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, did not attend the event but told the Resistance Rangers that their work carried historical weight. “The most lasting form of reparations is remembrance,” Mintz said. “We owe a debt to the past.”
The Resistance Rangers plan to set out again Saturday for a national protest of Trump’s vision of the 250th anniversary celebration. Organizers intend to collect signatures for a “declaration of interdependence” that advocates for safety, dignity, living wages and access to a clean environment for all.