The Trump administration’s overhaul of the President’s House memorial reveals other lies

The legal path to new panels

The current trouble began early in Trump’s second term, when he signed an executive order (“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”) warning that our public monuments must be “solemn and uplifting” and not anything the administration deemed “divisive”. Last summer, news broke that the administration was reviewing displays at the President’s House, a memorial installation at 6th and Market on the history of slavery in the US, and the people whom George Washington enslaved on that site. Last January, federal employees suddenly took down parts of the display, prompting an immediate lawsuit from the City of Philadelphia.

The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a Black-led activist group behind the formation of the original exhibits, quickly organized a movement to restore the panels. In February, I reported on ATAC’s rally after a judge ruled in favor of the City of Philadelphia, ordering that the federal government could not make any more changes to the site while the lawsuit continued (the ruling, which points out exactly how Orwellian the Trump administration is being, is really worth reading). BSR writer Constance Garcia-Barrio spoke with advocates later that month. Some of the exhibits were restored.

But this month, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the Trump administration, saying that since the site is owned by the National Park Service, the city can’t determine the content of exhibits there. The government acted quickly. Last week, in the middle of the night, officials removed the original exhibits and replaced them with panels approved by the Trump administration.

“The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition is not deterred,” ATAC leader Michael Coard wrote in the Inquirer on July 5. “Although we want justice and we want it now, we are students of history, and therefore know that African descendants in this country and African Americans here have never achieved success without struggle and delay.”

Surveillance and subversion

I visited the site on July 18. As the Inquirer reported the previous day, I saw US Park Police officers in black surveilling the area (that story details how a 72-year-old woman was cited for vandalism by federal agents for posting news articles on the walls).

Coard is among many experts pointing out the ways the new signage softens and obscures the real legacy of slavery at the site, for example emphasizing in two different places that Washington would buy theater tickets for the people he enslaved.

The scofflaw in chief

There are a couple books I would recommend to every single American, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge is one of them. Judge lived at this site before she fled slavery. Dunbar makes clear how Washington navigated a Pennsylvania law which at the time required that any enslaved person be freed after living in the state for six months. He would send the workers he enslaved in Philadelphia back to his Virginia plantation every six months to restart the clock.

The new signage notes that Washington (who signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793) “rotated enslaved persons in and out of the state in acknowledgement” of this law. But Washington was not “acknowledging” the law. He was actively flouting it.

A “love of freedom”?

The new panels nod to Ona Judge, giving a very brief biography accompanied by an illustration of a young Black woman in a ruffled white cap who appears to be doing needlework: demure, content, industrious, and silent. “Near the end of her life, when Judge was old and had outlived all of her family, people who spoke with her were impressed by her dignity, her faith in God, and her abiding love of freedom,” the text concludes.

That may be true, but recasting Judge’s flight as rooted in Christian faith or a gauzy “love of freedom” downplays her audacity, her ingenuity, and her specific lifelong defiance of America’s most powerful man. Clearly, the Trump administration doesn’t want us to get any ideas, and the placement of the new panels about enslaved people seems to confirm that: they are on the far side of the exhibit, away from the entrance on Market, and facing away from the grassy mall. You could walk through the site without even seeing them.

It’s a tragic perversion of the memorial’s original purpose as a place to explore the legacy of slavery in America and in our first president’s house. The exposed historic foundations visible here have been identified as the remains of the property’s slave quarters, but not a single piece of signage notes that now.

Power brag

The central brick-walled square of the installation used to have glass panels with lively, humanizing illustrations of diverse 18th-century Philadelphians along with short text. But these have been replaced with an outsize display on the US President’s executive power. One sign, titled The Need for an Executive Branch, pointedly quotes Alexander Hamilton: “Energy in the Executive is the leading character in the definition of good government … Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any great number…”

This emphasis echoes the unitary executive theory of nearly unlimited presidential power espoused by Trump allies and a majority of the Supreme Court, who have given Trump powers unprecedented in American history (including a king-like immunity for crimes committed in office).

There are no less than eight panels detailing aspects of presidential power where signage about Black Philadelphians once stood, which could be interpreted as the current executive branch’s giant middle finger to the people of Philadelphia, past and present.

“Every president since”

The new display contains at least one outright lie, and this, too, is a theme central to the Trump administration. One panel on executive power lauds Washington for relinquishing the presidency, claiming that “This peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Adams, and every president since, ensures the stability of the government and places the power back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people.”

In truth, that tradition of peaceful transfer lasted from 1797 until 2021, when Trump’s supporters responded to his election loss by storming the US Capitol while waving Confederate flags, carrying guns and zip ties, wounding and killing police officers, smearing the walls of the Capitol with filth, and erecting a noose and scaffold for the vice president as he fled for his life alongside Congress, all while Trump watched in satisfaction.

The fight is never finished

There is no doubt that the recent loss in court, and the current state of the President’s House memorial site, is a dark day for Philadelphia and our country. But we’ll listen to leaders like Michael Coard. The fight is not finished. It will never be finished. We will never stop celebrating Black history in Philly. We pay attention. We know the truth, we know what we deserve, and we the people will reclaim it.

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