Staff with the National Parks Service reinstate plaques about slavery at President’s House in Philadelphia on Thursday. The exhibit was removed in January as part of President Trump’s efforts to censor or remove historical exhibits that portray the United States in a “negative light.”Matthew Hatcher/Getty
On Thursday just before noon, bundled up couples and small groups of people wandered through the President’s House on Independence Hall, some snapping photos and others inquiring what was happening as four National Park employees worked in tandem, behind a barricade, to reattach panel after panel of the President’s House slavery exhibits. They worked in the cold, lifting the massive glass squares up onto the brick wall and then screwing them into place. Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle L. Parker approached, admiring the exhibit for a moment before shaking hands with the workers and thanking them.
“I want you to know I’m grateful,” Parker said. “It’s our honor,” one of the employees responded.
They continued to work until at least 16 panels of the memorial were reinstalled. The exhibits had been removed on a Thursday afternoon nearly a month before, in accordance with Trump’s 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order to rid “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties” of content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But after the city sued, US District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued an injunction ordering the government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.” That order was overruled on Friday, just one hour before the deadline Rufe had set for the exhibit’s reinstallation. Now, the National Park Service must maintain the status quo—leaving 16 of 34 panels up—while the federal government appeals the initial injunction.
For a community that fought to restore history, the initial order to restore the President’s House exhibit had been cause for celebration. “We need to understand what we’ve done here. This is actually a moment in time; your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are going to be talking about this for years and decades to come,” said Michael Coard, attorney and founding member of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a broad-based Black-led coalition of activists, on Thursday as the the National Park Service initially started to restore panels. “This here, right now, what we’ve done is people power.” As Coard spoke, he stood in front of a wall engraved with the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington. At the bottom of his podium rested the 1863 image “Scourged Back,” which was marked for removal from Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park last year.
ATAC had been an instrumental part of establishing the exhibit in 2010 and had filed an amicus brief in support of the city’s lawsuit on January 27.
The exhibit in Center City was one of a dozen other signs and materials from national parks removed after Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post reported that park staff interpreted the order as including “any references to historic racism, sexism, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.” As America approaches its 250th anniversary this year, these removals foreshadow a celebration that, on the national level, excludes underrepresented communities’ contributions to American history, refuses to reckon with its more difficult periods, and ultimately obfuscates the truth of our collective past.
When Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, the President’s House was the site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived and worked. The original building was demolished in 1832, but visitors today can still walk through its foundation, which sits near the Liberty Bell Center. The slavery exhibits at the President’s House include displays that memorialize the names and experiences of the nine people enslaved under Washington, along with relevant historical moments like Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793.
After the exhibit’s removal in January, the ATAC kept the space alive with numerous rallies. A few days prior to the court’s order to reinstall the panels, despite the leftover snow that piled along the sidewalks and on the lawn, hundreds of concerned Philadelphia community members gathered at the President’s House demanding the restoration of the slavery exhibit.
“African American history is American history, and we stand and continue to fight to make sure that Donald Trump will not whitewash the history here in the city of Philadelphia,” said Kenyatta Johnson, Philadelphia’s 2nd Council District President, as the crowd applauded. “It’s shameful that as we celebrate the 250th celebration of the birthplace of America that we have to be out here today advocating and fighting to make sure our true history—our true history, not his story—is known.”
Other speakers included a direct descendant of Black founding father Bishop Richard Allen, city council members, a historian, and a George Washington reenactor. They all echoed a similar message: the history presented by these panels needed to be restored because they tell an intrinsic part of American history, despite the current administration’s view that they were “disparaging.”
The main brick walls, where two long horizontal silver slabs hung covered in glue residue—a reminder of what had been there—had been plastered with various handmade flyers protesting the erasure of history and even recreating parts of the exhibit for those who came to view the site.
The City of Philadelphia filed their federal lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service the day the panels were initially removed, arguing the removal of the exhibit was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a 2006 Cooperative Agreement between Philadelphia and the federal government.
“This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again.”
“This action is a disservice to our city, our nation, and it denies future generations the chance to learn from our history, fostering an environment of ignorance rather than understanding,” said Catherine Hicks, the president of Philadelphia’s NAACP branch, to the crowd. “We must confront the complexities of our past, honoring the lives and legacies of those who suffered under the institution of slavery.”
Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher attending the rally, said every year she’d teach her students about the people Washington enslaved, particularly Ona Judge, a young woman who escaped to New Hampshire. This year, when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”
Gann said the exhibit’s removal reminded her of how vital educators are. “We can’t just feel satisfied that we’ve done enough,” she said. “Every year we have to renew our energy, our commitment to the truth, our commitment to Black uplift and celebrating stories of Black resilience and power and having our students see themselves in those stories.”
As the rally to restore history took place in Philadelphia, in Washington, the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held an oversight hearing titled “All in for America250: Public-Private Partnerships Supporting America’s Semiquincentennial on our Public Lands.”
During the hearing, Alan Spears, National Parks Conservation Association’s Senior Director for Cultural Resources, recalled that when he was young, his parents would take him to places like Gettysburg. He said it was there that his passion for American History manifested, but it didn’t “take hold” until he started seeing people who looked like him in those spaces.
“I think what we’re looking at right now is the danger of taking that in a completely opposite direction, where people don’t see themselves reflected or are seeing themselves actively removed and excised from our shared national narrative,” Spears said during the hearing. “We don’t need to go in that direction. This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again, about the times when we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature. That’s us too.”
John Garrison Marks, a historian and the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, had hoped that America’s anniversary would be an opportunity to “establish a more complete, more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of the nation’s history,” including the history of slavery.
Marks said people have debated Washington’s involvement in slavery for almost 250 years. The founding father enslaved people right up until the day he died, while privately writing about becoming “uneasy” with slavery and hoping that the institution would be abolished in southern states. Washington even circumvented a Pennsylvania law by deliberately moving the people he enslaved in and out of the state every six months to ensure they wouldn’t be freed by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Marks noted that the president understood the hypocrisy of leading a revolution to found a nation dedicated to the ideas of liberty and equality while enslaving people.
Marks said you can’t to talk about Washington without talking about his involvement in slavery. He argued that some people struggle to see Washington as “an actual human being” with “egregious flaws,” and instead see him as a symbol of the nation itself; for some, “criticizing Washington is criticizing America.”
“There are a lot of people whose sense of patriotism, whose sense of self, is tied to the idea that America is the land of the free, is tied up in the idea that this is a nation that should only be celebrated,” he said. “And when you try to introduce this idea that we need to reckon with the history of slavery to understand Washington, there are a lot of people who view that as kind of a personal attack.”
With Philadelphia having the potential to see so many visitors this year, not only for the 250th anniversary, but for the FIFA World Cup or the MLB All-Star Game, the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House was “a huge missed opportunity” to give people an uncensored history, one that Marks believes most people want to learn.
“On the eve of the 250th there are going to be people who are now waving the flag talking about how they love this country, and my thing is this: you can’t love a thing or a person until you know the good, the bad and the ugly,” Coard said after the rally. “So, the 250th shines a spotlight about the absolute necessity of knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your country.”
Following the initial legal victory, community members were cautiously hopeful.
“My heart is really exploding with joy, but it’s the type of joy that we often experience as Black people in this country,” said Michelle Flamer, a retired attorney, who helped get the exhibit installed over 15 years ago. “Where is the permanency? I want to make sure that this is permanent and not to ever be taken away. This history belongs here. There have been many people who have talked about moving it somewhere else or telling it, and I support efforts to continue to tell this history as broadly and as widely as possible, but it belongs here on this ground, because this is actually where the president’s house existed.”
Whatever the result of the administration’s fight to change the signage at the President’s House and other sites across the country, nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.
