The National Park Service announced last week that our national parks will no longer provide free admission on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.
The park service removed the two official federal holidays that honor Black American history from its 2026 list of free entrance days — and added Donald Trump’s birthday.
Eliminating free entry on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is especially concerning, Kristen Brengel, a spokesperson for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, told the Guardian.
The holiday has become a popular day of service nationwide, and many community groups rely on free admission to organize volunteer projects in the national parks that day, she said. Those projects may now be prohibitively expensive.
“Not only does it recognize an American hero, it’s also a day when people go into parks to clean them up,” Brengel said. “Martin Luther King Jr. deserves a day of recognition… For some reason, Black history has repeatedly been targeted by this administration, and it shouldn’t be.”
NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement that the change is consistent with President Trump’s efforts “to distract and divide us by undermining progress attributed to the Black community.”
“Removing MLK Day and Juneteenth from the national parks calendar is more than petty politics—it’s an attack on the truth of this nation’s history,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s an attempt to erase the legacy of Dr. King, minimize the story of emancipation, and sideline the communities that have fought for generations to make America live up to its promise.”
The move is the latest in a series of announcements and actions taken by the Trump regime to minimize, rewrite, or erase American history related to enslavement and its legacy of racial injustice.
Since January, federal agencies have ordered hundreds of words like “injustice” and “inequality” erased from government websites; removed books by prominent Black authors from school libraries and forced teachers to take down bulletin boards about Black History Month and leaders like Dr. King and Rosa Parks; and disappeared the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, and other Black Americans from websites and training materials.
The president has targeted the Smithsonian Institution for focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and refused to acknowledge Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in America.
The National Park Service was ordered to remove materials related to slavery from digital and physical exhibits, restore a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery while scrubbing histories of prominent Black, Hispanic, and female service members buried in the cemetery, and reinstall Confederate monuments.
Additionally, the Department of Defense dishonored Black Americans by changing nine Army base names back to the names of Confederate secessionists who championed the Ku Klux Klan, believed Black people should not have the right to vote, and argued for decades after the Civil War that white people were superior to people of other races.
New York State is home to 24 sites managed by the National Park Service, including famous landmarks like the Saratoga Battlefield, Stonewall, Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and historic homes of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
New York has several National Park Service sites uniquely connected to Black American history, notably the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park and the African Burial Ground National Monument.
New York Almanack is reporting on the Trump regime’s impacts in New York State, but we can’t do it without your help. Please support this work.
A better idea would be to add the day of Trump’s PASSING AWAY as a day of celebration and group cleanp-up, since this country will have to clean up all the MESS he will have left when he is done destroying this country.
Furthermore…..
I predict Donald Trump will die on a national holiday.
Because ANY day he dies will be a NATIONAL HOLIDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Trump is beyond a petulant sociopathic ego maniac. He is a disgrace to our nation. I only hope that many who vote voted for him, see the error of their ways.
I propose that Donald Trump be awarded the igNoble Prize. He’s so enamored of the other similar sounding one, but so completely unfit. This one however, he is UNIQUELY qualified to inaugurate.
I like Bill’s comment here, and I would vote for this for the man, the igNoble Prize. With a DUNCE cap on top.
I agree with my friend Bob here and could add a few more adjectives but will leave it to the imagination. Some of my friends who voted for him have reconsidered, and I am hoping the movement has begun. May the midterms pour cold water on his parade.
AMEN!
I can only add to these comments this message to those who voted for him, “HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW?”. Might make a good baseball cap with an American flag.
The American Embarrassment is an egomaniacal racist. On top of that, he acts like a petulant child who throws a tantrum whenever he can’t get his own way. These holidays can/will be reversed when he is finally gone, thankfully. The damage he has down to our safety, finances, environment, and our standing in the world will, unfortunately, not so easily be corrected.
How anyone could have thought a vote for a convicted felon, with a history of lying, immorality, and an inability to keep his promises, is completely beyond me. SMH
Unfortunately, in this under educated nation, there are a lot of ignorant, fearful, gullible, people who are attracted to evil people like Trump. And then there are the out and out racist, xenophobes, antisemites, misogynist, and other sickos.