Racial reckoning turns focus to roadside historical markersPennsylvania is undertaking a comprehensive examination of the stories told by its 2,500 roadside historical markersABC News, Dec 27, 2021, Associated Press
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Pennsylvania had been installing historical markers for more than a century when the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, 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 Montgomery, Alabama-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.
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