The National Park Service announced this 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 history from its 2026 list of free entrance days—and added President 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,” Ms. 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 administration 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 American heroes 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.
And 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.