RACIAL RECKONING TURNS FOCUS TO HISTORICAL MARKERS
Pennsylvania had been installing historical markers for more than a century when the racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., 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.
The increased scrutiny helped prompt a review of all 2,500 markers by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, a process that has focused on factual errors, inadequate historical context, and racist or otherwise inappropriate references.
So far, the state has removed two markers, revised two and ordered new text for two others.
Across the country, historical markers have in some places become another front in the national reckoning over slavery, segregation and racial violence that has also brought down Civil War statues and changed or reconsidered the names of institutions, roads and geographical features.
The idea that “who is honored, what is remembered, what is memorialized tells a story about a society that can’t be reflected in other ways” is behind an effort by the Birmingham, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative that has installed dozens of markers, mostly in the South, to remember racial terror lynchings.
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.
“By being able to tell everybody’s story, it’s good for the society as a whole. It’s not to take away from anybody else,” Turner said. “Let’s have these stories, because the more truth we have, the better it is.”
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, Tenn.; Sherman, Texas; and Colfax, La.
In Pennsylvania, the commission examined all of the 2,500 markers it controls with a focus on how African American and Native American lives and stories are portrayed and adopted a new policy on how markers are established. About a year ago it identified 131 existing markers that may require changes, including a subgroup of 18 that required immediate attention.
“The language could be sexist, it could be racist, it could be all those different things,” said Jacqueline Wiggins, a retired educator from Philadelphia on the state historical commission’s Marker Review Panel. “There’s work to be done.”