Racial reckoning turns focus to roadside historical markers

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. State government took down a marker in Pittsburgh’s Point State Park that noted the location where British Gen. John Forbes had a 1758 military victory that the marker claimed “established Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States.” The commission also revised markers in central Pennsylvania’s Fulton County related to the movement of Confederate Army troops after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and related to an 1864 Confederate cavalry raid on Chambersburg that left much of the town a smoldering ruin. And this month, a senior state House Republican press aide, Steve Miskin, responded to a news account about the Fulton County markers with a tweet asking, “Is Pennsylvania planning to remove ‘The Confederacy’ from textbooks? Native American-related markers generally frame the Indigenous people in terms of the Europeans who displaced them, such as a Juniata County marker about “a stockade built about 1755 to protect settlers from Indian marauder.” “There is a lot of tap-dancing over who initiated which battle or skirmish,” said historian Ira Beckerman, who recently produced a study focused on Pennsylvania markers that relate to Black and Native American history. If the Native Americans responded in kind, it was a massacre, savagery, etc.” Beckerman concluded that as a whole, the state’s 348 Native American historical markers “tell a pretty accurate and compelling story of racism and white nationalism.” ___ Associated Press News Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.