Harriet Tubman info on Underground Railroad web page was erased in error, NPS officials say

Information about the abolitionist Harriet Tubman was wrongly removed from a National Park Service web page about the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves, the agency said.

The page, dedicated to the network of safe houses and people giving aid that helped enslaved people flee the South toward free Northern states and abroad, especially during the Civil War, was edited sometime between Feb. 11 and Feb. 21, even removing a quotation from Tubman.

The older version of the webpage, now restored, featured Tubman saying, “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

The temporary version replaced the Tubman quote with a series of stamps stressing racial cooperation, including one of her, and installed new verbiage calling the Underground Railroad “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement during its evolution over more than three centuries” that “bridged the divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality.”

The explicit mention of slavery and that those enslaved were African Americans was moved from the first sentence of the article after the Tubman quote to the second section of the article.

“Changes to the Underground Railroad page on the National Park Service’s website were made without approval from NPS leadership nor department leadership,” NPS spokeswoman Rachel Pawlitz told Axios on Monday.

The edited version was up until at least Sunday before the original webpage and the Tubman quote at the top were restored by Tuesday.

The Underground Railroad page is not the only government page to garner scrutiny for edits following the start of the second Trump administration, which has made removing DEI from government initiatives and communications a priority.

Last month, a page mentioning the military service of Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, was briefly purged from the Defense Department website. The page was later restored. Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot said that when changes on its website go beyond the department’s directive against DEI, those changes are corrected.