Telling Hard History at Brown v. Board: A Superintendent on Truth Without More Trauma

In September 2022, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland spoke at Scott's Branch High School in Summerton, South Carolina — a future part of Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park:

"It is our solemn responsibility at the Department of the Interior, as caretakers of America's national treasures, to tell the whole, and sometimes difficult, story of our nation. These stories are not always easy. And they can be traumatic. But it is my duty to ensure that they are told. Because our story, is America's story."

National Park Service Director Chuck Sams, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Superintendent Jim Williams, Congressman James Clyburn, Ethel Brown Marshall and Beatrice Brown Rivers at Scott's Branch High School, Summerton, South Carolina, 2022. DOI photo

In May 2024, the park's superintendent, James H. Williams, wrote about what that commitment means in practice.

The mandate

Congress passed, and President Joseph R. Biden signed, the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park Expansion and Redesignation Act (Public Law 117-123) "to honor the civil rights stories of struggle, perseverance, and activism in the pursuit of education equity." The park tries to tell that whole story wherever it meets the public — at the Monroe School in Topeka, online, and in the communities it works with.

Not softening it

Two choices show how far the park goes:

• A "hall of courage" in the exhibits recreates what Black students faced as they walked into newly desegregated schools past angry white crowds shouting racial slurs.
• The park does not bleep the "n word" in historical film footage. Visitors are warned they may find it upsetting.

Visitors' reactions, Williams writes, show that for many this is a powerful way to grasp what Black Americans endured in the 1950s.

An agency facing its own past

Williams notes that Haaland, the first Native American secretary of the interior, understands historical trauma, and undertook a "healing tour" through Indian Country to acknowledge harm the Department of the Interior itself has done to Native Americans and other minority groups. The National Park Service has its own such history: in creating parks it displaced Native Americans, poor white Appalachians and others, at a time when they were seen as obstacles to a "pristine" landscape.

So the agency, while trying to heal harm it caused, also struggles with how to tell the truth about American history without inflicting more trauma — on visitors, and on the people who lived under the educational policies the park interprets. Comfort, Williams argues, is the enemy of progress: it is always possible to retreat into the comfortable parts of the national story, as Americans often have, but progress has come only when people found the courage to face the uncomfortable, even horrifying, parts.

The questions the park lives with

• When we quote or show historical documents full of racism and hatred that are condemned today, do we lend those ideas credibility?
• Can we — and our visitors — find the truth about the past by toning down its ugliest episodes?
• Are we offering a place of reckoning, reconciliation and healing, where people can share stories and talk about the past? Or are we re-traumatizing those who lived it, and live with it still?

People will answer these differently. In its galleries, the park invites visitors to reflect and leave their thoughts on sticky notes, with the promise that it "is where hard conversations happen." The work, Williams writes, is neither easy nor always comfortable.

What's next

The park is taking part in the America 250 commemoration in 2026, and is rethinking how it tells the story of the Brown decision and its legacies ahead of the decision's 75th anniversary in 2029. It asks Americans everywhere to take part and share their views.

Sources

Based on "Telling the Whole, and Sometimes Difficult, Stories," by James H. Williams, PhD, superintendent, May 2024, National Park Service, Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Secretary Haaland's remarks are quoted as the article gives them. The article dates her visit September 27, 2022, in the text and September 29, 2022, in the photo caption, so only the month is given here; its "Expansion and Resignation Act" is corrected to "Redesignation". Rewritten in hubnx's own words.