Nearly two decades ago, Jim Hunn was wandering around a cemetery in Lincoln county, Kentucky, when a small headstone caught his eye. He stared at the name etched on it: Jordan Wallace. Hunn can’t explain exactly why, but he felt an instant attachment.



“I got a feeling when I saw it,” he said.

He later learned that Wallace was his great-great-grandfather: a slave who, with his father and two brothers, escaped his owner’s home in 1864 to travel to Camp Nelson, a nearby Union army supply depot and recruitment camp where more than 10,000 African American soldiers lived during the civil war while serving in the US Colored Troops, who fought for the Union. Wallace and his sons joined the troops when they arrived.

Camp Nelson has existed in relative obscurity since then, despite its pivotal role in the history of US slavery. But now years of hard work by local enthusiasts to protect the site may be paying off. In an unexpected and little-noticed move, the Trump administration, which drastically shrank national monuments in Utah, recently proposed turning Camp Nelson into a monument, along with another site in Mississippi, commemorating African American history.

We want to show that the Birmingham civil rights national monument is in the same system as Yosemite

“Nobody knows it’s here, or the significance of this place for African Americans,” Hunn, a soft-spoken 77-year-old man, said as he rocked in a wooden rocking chair on the porch of Camp Nelson’s interpretive center one windy day in late March. “It makes me proud to know where I came from. My theory is if you are black and born in Kentucky, you had somebody connected to Camp Nelson.”

These proposed designations are striking because Donald Trump has, for instance, partly blamed anti-racism marchers for violence at a white supremacist rally, and his administration has made moves to roll back civil rights protections. Both sites are important symbols of black history that local communities, lawmakers, and historians say have long deserved national recognition.

The National Park Service, which manages 417 parks, monuments and historic sites around the US, has been criticized for failing to attract a racially diverse workforce and visitors. Alan Spears, cultural resources director for the National Parks Conservation Association, estimates that about 40 of the agency’s sites are related to African American experiences and history.

As that number grows, his organization is working to help the agency “diversify the constituency of national parks. We hope to use sites like these as points of entry to overcome that – to show that the Birmingham civil rights national monument is in the same system as Yosemite.”

Jim Hunn inside the civil war museum at Camp Nelson. Photograph: David Stephenson/The Guardian

Camp Nelson would be a unique property in the system. The 600-acre civil war heritage park is nestled on a few rolling hills of bluegrass between thoroughbred horse farms and bourbon distilleries near Nicholasville, Kentucky. In 1863, the camp was established as a recruiting station and supply base for Union military operations in Kentucky and Tennessee.

White state leaders refused to let slaves enlist, but the sheer number arriving at the camp forced the army to allow them. Their family members often accompanied them, and in November 1864, the army kicked 400 women and children out in the frigid Kentucky winter, and 103 died. It caused such a national uproar that Congress passed a bill freeing the families of slaves who enlisted in the Union army.

The army built a “refugee camp” for 3,000 people, and Camp Nelson spanned 4,000 acres, with more than 300 buildings and homes. It was the third-largest recruitment base for the US Colored Troops in the nation. Some estimates show that by the time the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery was ratified, 70% of Kentucky’s slaves had already been emancipated – in large part because of Camp Nelson.

Since the 1990s, the archeologist Stephen McBride has worked with local residents, state lawmakers and county officials in Jessamine County, Kentucky, to protect Camp Nelson. With monument status, McBride hopes that more people will, like Hunn, find personal connections. They could also hire a superintendent and employees. “It will give us more recognition and get our story out to more people,” he said.

‘We have to make it more equitable’

The other site under consideration is the Jackson, Mississippi, home of Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP who organized boycotts over segregation all around the state during the civil rights movement. On 12 June 1963, Evers arrived in his home after a meeting with NAACP lawyers, and when he got out of his car he was shot in the back by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The bullet ricocheted into Evers’ home. He died that evening and was buried with full military honors at Arlington national cemetery.

The grounds at Camp Nelson in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Photograph: The Guardian

His home, a one-story turquoise and brick house, is a national historic landmark and museum that has been restored to look as it did when the Evers family lived there. It is managed by a college, but age has taken a toll on the building. Monument status would help secure maintenance funds.

“His home being added as a monument is just a fitting tribute to someone of his stature,” said the Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson, who has been working for more than a decade to establish the monument. “It’s an opportunity to say to the world, ‘here’s a man who didn’t break the law and was assassinated in his driveway.’ We can’t ever let that go away.”

Bills about both sites are currently being decided on by Congress, and it could take years for them to be fully integrated in the National Park Service system. The administration’s motivations for recognizing them – along with a Montana area connected with Native American history called Badger-Two Medicine – is questioned by some public land and civil rights advocates.

“We do have concerns that there is some effort to detract attention from ongoing efforts to reduce the size of national monuments by holding out smaller significant historical cultural sites,” said Spears. “It would be wonderful to have these added to the national park system, but not at the cost of reducing the size of national monuments.”

Still, efforts to preserve these sites have seen broad support in their states, and the prospect remains profoundly inspiring for local residents such as Corey Wiggins, the executive director of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, who works in the office Evers spent many years in before his death.

“As a country, sometimes we don’t want to sit with tough pain and struggle,” he said. “We have to make it a more equitable and fair place, and this is a step toward that direction.”