The National Park Service (NPS) is set to remove the photo of an enslaved man’s scars amid efforts to comply with the Trump administration’s March executive order outlawing exhibits that promote a “corrosive ideology.”
NPS said the piece widely referenced as “The Scourged Back” will no longer be available for viewing, sources told The Washington Post.
The move comes after President Trump ordered the Interior Department to review multiple museums including the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery of Art, where the striking image of Peter Gordon, a formerly enslaved individual, was previously on display.
“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz told the Post.
NPS did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
Harper’s Weekly originally published the photo on Independence Day in 1863, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg. At the time, it chronicled Gordon’s escape from a Louisiana plantation before he took up arms for the Union during the Civil War, the Portrait Gallery website explains.
One journalist after seeing the image said, “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by 100,000 and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye,” according to the Smithsonian museum.
The institution used the image as an opportunity to inform students of the “compelling visual proof of slavery’s brutality” outlining corresponding activities for teachers to convey after showcasing the image.
However, Trump’s March order said museums with reflections of slavery or other brutalities are “inherently harmful and oppressive.”
“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the order states.
In addition to the revocation of “The Scourged Back” display, 30 other signs at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia, where John Brown led a slave revolt, have been flagged as “out of compliance” the Post reported.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump said last month on Truth Social.
“This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums,” he added at the time.
