From KKK halls to slave auction sites, communities rethink historic sites

Communities across the United States are rethinking what to do with landmarks tied to racist history, Axios reports. In Fort Worth, Texas, advocates are converting a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into an arts and community center named for a Black lynching victim, framed as a reparative justice project. Similar efforts are underway elsewhere: a former segregated theater in Laurens, South Carolina became an antihate education center, a slave auction block in Fredericksburg, Virginia was moved to a museum, and in Drew, Mississippi, the barn where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was killed in nineteen fifty-five is being turned into a memorial. Axios notes the changes come as the Trump administration pushes federal sites toward what a twenty twenty-five executive order cast as a more uplifting version of American history, a directive now tied up in court.

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