Save Our Signs releases its database of signs from national parks. Let’s hope we don’t need it.
An image from the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, titled “A Playground and Community Center,” hosted on the Save Our Signs website. (Save our Signs)
Open the website, click on the thumbnail and you will see it.
The shadow.
In the photo, the outline of a person holding a camera darkens an educational plaque at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka. The bright, slanting sunlight pushes the shadows long — long enough that the person taking the photo can’t avoid being in it.
Some people might see that shadow, obscuring the bottom corner of the display, as a flaw of the photo. It’s my favorite part.
That nameless person, in an act of mini-political resistance, left their home and photographed the sign as part of Save Our Signs, a nationwide effort to document and preserve the signs at sites operated by the National Park Service. The shadow memorializes their tiny bit of activism against the Trump administration’s censorship, which both looms and grows.
A few weeks ago I wrote a column about the collaborative online effort led by librarians and researchers. After the Trump administration threatened to scrub language on signs at national historic sites, the organizers of Save Our Signs nudged a phalanx of photographers to submit images.
At that time, three of the five sites administered by the National Park Service in Kansas had not yet been documented with photos, and the people at Save Our Signs were reviewing and confirming photos. So the images had not been posted.
This week, Save Our Signs posted the submitted photos, including photos from four of the five Kansas locations. Those documented locations? Brown v. Board of Education, Fort Scott, Nicodemus and the Tallgrass Prairie.
Fort Larned sadly does not have any photos posted yet.
The page for Nicodemus features 47 photographs, including the exteriors of buildings, educational signs and an artist biography. As a photography teacher, I can confirm that none of the photos are compositional masterpieces — but that is exactly the point. The photos plainly represent what is there. No need for rule-of-thirds composition or dramatic lighting. The best photos allow us to read the text on each sign clearly so that we can monitor and critique any changes that the Department of the Interior makes.
As I clicked through the images this week on the website, I was simultaneously encouraged and chagrined.
An image from the Fort Scott National Historic Site, titled “Fort Scott Today.” (Save our Signs)
Encouraged, because the website stands as patriotic proof. Consider the federal employees who spent days and weeks of their professional lives creating these historical displays. At Fort Scott, there is an aerial map, which illustrates the historic site while combining it with a timeline. It’s more effective than a glitzy drone video on a big screen.
You’ll find even more patriotism if you join me in appreciating the folks who created the Save Our Signs website. The dedication that they show to free speech and their opposition to censorship hold up the First Amendment. Add to that their commitment to telling America’s full story, an honest effort pointing our nation in a virtuous direction, rather than the Trump administration’s threats to tamp down historical truths.
Staring in the face of all that patriotism — the federal employees, the amateur photographers, the website creators — is the grim possibility that these signs might begin to disappear, because these signs might be whitewashed soon with this administration’s metaphorical bleach.
If these signs continue to be altered, Save Our Signs might provide an insurgent online history, but it won’t be able to match the in-person experience. The magic of the National Park Service cannot live exclusively online.
My son and I clicked our way through the photo archive last night. First, we realized how few national parks we have visited. Next, we visited the page of photographs dedicated to the Statue of Liberty National Monument.
An image from the Statue of Liberty National Monument, titled “Cover of Puck Magazine sign.” (Save our Signs)
On that page, there is an image of a plaque, which reads, “This Puck magazine cover pollutes the likeness of the Statue of Liberty to call attention to the widespread lynchings, disenfranchisement, segregation, and poverty that African Americans experienced after the Civil War.” The same caption exists online on the National Park Service website, titled “Embracing Liberty.”
The online database allows us to intellectually process the message. Yes, widespread lynchings. Yes, disenfranchisement. Yes, segregation. Yes, poverty.
But to swallow those words while standing at the base of the Statue of Liberty like we both did, the historical tension pulls. Beyond anything intellectual, you feel the sinew of America straining. Why was France inspired to gift Lady Liberty to the United States in the midst of so much American injustice? How does that statue look to the African Americans of New York City? The plaque surfaces those questions without asking them.
These are the profound questions that our nation’s greatest treasures — statues, mountain ranges, forts, battlefields — are poised to ask.
In fact, the tense questions are as much our treasures as the statue itself.
Those same locations would stand mute with context. Without the uncomfortable history, it’s just a schoolhouse in Topeka. Or an ambitious town on the plains called Nicodemus. Or a pretty prairie of wildflowers.
The alternative? That visitors to national park sites will navigate to the Save Our Signs website and read the uncensored history: visitors standing, cellphones in hand, pinching and zooming and clicking. Pointing to blank spots in the landscape, the visitors might wonder where the signs once stood.
If that is our shared national experience of visiting when we visit these sites, the Trump administration will have stripped away a central charm of visiting, because these places should guide us away from our phones, instead soaking up our nation’s history — without meddling from the person in power at the moment.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.