New avenue for revising presentation of history of racism in U.S.: roadside markers
— Pennsylvania had been installing historical markers for more than a century when the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 brought a fresh round of questions from the public about just whose stories were being told on the state's roadsides - and the language used to tell them.
Historical markers educate the public and therefore can help fight systemic racism, said Diane Turner, curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia, one of the country's largest repositories of Black history literature and related material. State government took down a marker in Pittsburgh's Point State Park that noted the location where British General John Forbes had a 1758 military victory that the marker claimed"established Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States."
"My fear is that the commission is becoming less of a true historical arbiter and more of a miniaturized version of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth that has government officers alter history to fit the convenient narrative of those in charge," state Representative Parke Wentling wrote. Disputes about how historical markers should be worded - or whether they should exist at all - have divided communities in other states in recent years, including in Memphis, Tennessee; Sherman, Texas; and Colfax, Louisiana.
The commission is offering financial support for the markers if their subjects concern women, Hispanics, Latinos and Asian Americans, or if they are about Black and LGBTQ history outside Philadelphia. Last year, the agency subsidized markers on petroglyphs in Clarion County, a camp where Muhammed Ali trained in Schuylkill County, and the site of a boycott that stopped a school segregation effort in Chester County.
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