After a weekslong battle, Black Philadelphians and their allies have notched a victory: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore a slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site in the city.
Without warning, National Park Service workers in January removed panels about slavery from the President’s House Site, where George Washington and John Adams resided during their presidencies. The move was part of the administration’s targeting of information it claims disparages the country’s national values.
Local officials and residents pushed back against what they saw as the whitewashing of Black history in the public square. The city of Philadelphia escalated the fight to federal court, filing a lawsuit against Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron over the dismantling of the exhibit.
The city contends that the removal was carried out in violation of an agreement requiring the National Park Service, which is managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, to consult with the city before making changes to the site.
Capital B reached out to the city for an interview but did not hear back by the time of publication.
“You cannot erase our history,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said in a recent video posted on social media. “Yes, it is flawed. Yes, it is imperfect, and yes, it includes the real-life lived experiences and stories of people who endured a great deal of pain, so that America could realize its promise.”
Parker, Philadelphia’s 100th mayor and the first Black woman to serve in the role, is helping to lead the effort to protect the city’s history, especially as the country approaches its 250th anniversary.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia M. Rufe granted the city a preliminary injunction, ordering the federal government to restore the site while the lawsuit plays out. In her 40-page opinion, she likened the administration’s conduct to behavior out of dystopian fiction.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance Is Strength,’ this court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote. “It does not.”
Rufe, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added that “each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.”
Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson praised the ruling, which the federal government is expected to appeal.
“The President’s House exhibit at Independence National Historical Park tells an essential and honest story about slavery in the shadow of Independence Hall — a story that is central to our nation’s founding and to Philadelphia’s history,” he said in a statement. “Black history is American history.”
The ruling came the day before a broad coalition of historians, scientists, and advocates filed litigation in Boston to prevent the sanitizing of history and science at national parks.
In the 1790s, the President’s House functioned as the country’s first executive mansion. Washington enslaved Black Americans while he lived there, but the stories of these men, women, and children were largely elided from the site’s story until activists forced a reckoning in the early 2000s.
Michael Coard, an attorney and the founding member of the Philadelphia-based Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, was one of those activists. The organization — a group of advocates and scholars — oversaw a successful campaign to erect a slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site, which is near the Liberty Bell.
Coard told Capital B in December that he saw President Donald Trump’s issuing of the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order in March as a warning shot. It was followed a couple months later by an order calling for the review of “any public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that have been “removed or changed from January 1, 2020.”
“There wasn’t much activism going on regarding historical sites in the U.S., and certainly nothing here in Philadelphia,” Coard said. “But once [Trump] did what he did, we got folks from all cross sections of Philadelphia society — archeologists, architects, preservationists, historians, tour guides — to come together.”
Part of broader whitewashing
The effort to dismantle the panels at the President’s House Site isn’t an isolated act, historians say, but rather part of a larger attempt to scrub from public view information that emphasizes the experiences of marginalized groups.
In January, the administration removed the Pride flag from New York City’s Stonewall National Monument — the first federal monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights. This was to adhere to a National Park Service memorandum banning, with some exceptions, “non-agency flags and pennants within the National Park System”
Following the flag’s removal, residents raised it once again, saying that “it’s part of the history of Stonewall, and so to remove the flag from Stonewall is to question the history.”
In a similar move that advocates denounced as an effort to soften the country’s tougher histories, the Interior Department revealed last November that, beginning in 2026, U.S. residents would no longer receive free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Juneteenth.
Both holidays were on the list of free entrance days last year, and the recent U-turn has ended a symbolic gesture intended to link public lands to acknowledgments of Black civil rights.
And last summer, signs appeared at National Park Service sites around the country — including at the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in the Mississippi Delta and on Chicago’s South Side — urging visitors to scan a QR code to report content deemed “negative about either past or living Americans.”
This came just months after attempts to delete Black history from federal websites triggered a public outcry.
Such steady narrowing of whose experiences are considered central to the national narrative should spur forceful responses, according to Alan Spears, the senior director of cultural resources in the National Parks Conservation Association’s government affairs department.
These actions, he said, underscore how sites that highlight the lives of Black Americans and other marginalized groups have become flashpoints in a widening political struggle, as officials seek to reshape public memory by casting clear-eyed accounts of injustice as unpatriotic.
“When you start to fiddle around with history, that isn’t what makes a country great,” he told Capital B last year. “It makes us weaker. And it makes us meaner, because we’re going to be much less informed about the broad sweep of U.S. history and all the people who have contributed to making this country a good country.”