The National Park Service tore down slavery exhibits Thursday at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell and the remains of a house where George Washington resided during his presidency along with a retinue of enslaved servants.
The exhibits were affixed to an outdoor facade, built on the foundation of the former residence, and included several large educational panels about enslaved Africans, including ones titled “Life Under Slavery” and “The Dirty Business of Slavery.”
Their sudden removal Thursday afternoon, which prompted a lawsuit in federal court by the city’s mayor, was first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer and other local outlets. It is the most visible removal ordered as park leaders attempt to comply with the Trump administration’s effort to purge national park sites of content that runs afoul of President Donald Trump’s vision of U.S. history.
The overhaul of the national park site — and potentially many others — comes as the Trump administration turns its attention to the celebration this summer of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Philadelphia City Council member Kenyatta Johnson called the removal of the exhibit an effort to “whitewash American history” that threatens public understanding of the past.
“History cannot be erased simply because it is uncomfortable,” Johnson said in a statement. “Removing items from the President’s House merely changes the landscape, not the historical record.”
Trump issued an executive order last year titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that demanded U.S. historical sites depict the country as a consistent progressive force and slammed what the president characterized as a focus on negative history that generates “a sense of national shame.” The order called out the Independence park by name as a place subjected to “corrosive ideology.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed up in May with an order telling the NPS and other agencies to comply with the presidential order, calling for a sweeping review of national park sites for “negative” depictions of U.S. history and historical figures. A subsequent internal review at parks flagged exhibits depicting the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and chattel slavery, including a Georgia national monument’s display of a photo of an enslaved man with a back scarred by whipping.
Interior defended the removals in Philadelphia as in compliance with the presidential order.
“All federal agencies are to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,” the agency said in a statement. “Following completion of the required review, the National Park Service is now taking appropriate action in accordance with the Order.”
The agency also slammed the city of Philadelphia over what it called a “frivolous lawsuit in the hopes of demeaning our brave Founding Fathers who set the brilliant road map for the greatest country in the world.”
Park sites around the country are now ratcheting up efforts to alter potentially hundreds of exhibits and educational panels to comply with the Trump administration ordered changes, one senior NPS official said.
They were granted anonymity because they feared reprisal for speaking to the press.
A flurry of changes has already taken place. Signs discussing climate change were removed this month at the Fort Sumter National Monument, a coastal park site that’s vulnerable to rising sea levels exacerbated by climate change, according to reporting from The New York Times.
The rollout has put tremendous pressure on a team of experts in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, who are responsible for creating much of agency’s educational materials, the park service official said.
That team has historically been about 80 to 100 people, but Trump buyout offers to federal employees and consolidation of park service staff under Interior has slashed its numbers. It totals roughly 60 people now, according to the NPS official.
The sweeping effort to change how NPS tells U.S. history has upset some park staffers who feel conflicted about carrying out the orders, the park official said.
“I haven’t met many people that agree with any of what’s happening here,” they said. “We have to do this work and do it well, and yet every fabric of my being is angry and upset by it.”
The Philadelphia removals have faced a flurry of criticisms.
Ed Stierli, the senior mid-Atlantic regional director at the National Parks Conservation Association, called taking down the exhibit at Independence Park an “insult to the memory of the enslaved people who lived there and to their descendents.”
“Few stories are more integral to the fabric of this country than the story of American independence, and there is nowhere better to learn that story than Independence National Historical Park,” he said in a statement. “But being proud of our independence does not mean we should hide the mistakes of our past. National parks should help us grapple with the truths, complexities, and contradictions of our history.”
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, the first Black woman to hold the job, sued the Trump administration Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in an effort to immediately restore the exhibits.
The city, which owns buildings at the park site that are managed by NPS, has an agreement with the Interior Department that any major changes to the properties will be mutually agreed upon. The city signed over the intellectual property to the NPS in 2015, which include works that “expressly address slavery.” The city’s lawyers, however, argue in their filing that the 2015 deal “did not include the authority to materially alter or destroy altogether the exhibit underlying the copyright.”
George Washington’s role in enslavement has long been a subject of Americans’ reckoning with the shameful part of U.S. history, said John Garrison Marks, a historian and author of “Thy Will Be Done,” a book to be published this spring about Washington’s legacy with slavery.
The former president’s time at the executive residence in Philadelphia underscores how deeply involved Washington and his family were in the institution of slavery, even as the president spoke in private letters of supporting eventual abolition, Marks said.
Washington lived in the Philadelphia house during his presidency along with a mix of free and enslaved servants between 1790 and 1797, including an enslaved chef and personal attendants for him and his wife, Martha Washington. During that time, the Washingtons schemed to evade an abolitionist law in Pennsylvania that grants freedom to any enslaved person who has lived in the state for six months, an effort described in the president’s personal letters.
At least every six months, the Washingtons rotated slaves between the Philadelphia property and the family’s lands in Virginia or sent enslaved people briefly out of state, to evade this law, Marks said, calling it a “deep and tragic irony.”
In 1796, one of the enslaved servants, 22-year-old Ona Judge, escaped from the Philadelphia property. George Washington spent years trying to track the young woman down and expressed dismay at her ingratitude for escaping, Marks said.
The removal of the slavery exhibits at this property continue a long history by some Americans to shield Washington’s legacy from the tangle of his role in enslavement of Black people, Marks said.
“There have always been Americans who want to sweep this history under the rug. They want to ignore or silence it. They don’t want to acknowledge that the father of his country, as they call him, was so involved in the institution of slavery,” Marks said. “We see that very clearly today, that there are still Americans who are unwilling to kind of recognize this flaw, much less reckon with it.”
