The National Park Service quietly released images this week of an exhibit about George Washington and slavery designed to replace one taken down in Philadelphia earlier this year, featuring new panels that downplay the first president’s role as a slaveholder.
The panels — 11 in all — recast Washington as a figure who long held anti-slavery beliefs in private, treated his enslaved workers to theater tickets and freed the enslaved people he owned upon his death. They minimize the focus from the removed exhibit — at Independence National Historical Park in downtown Philadelphia — on the nine enslaved people Washington brought to Philadelphia during his first years as president, one of whom escaped from Washington’s household to freedom during that time.
The new panels also include general information about the Declaration of Independence, slavery during British rule, the abolition movement, and a section on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
The outdoor exhibit, located on the foundations of Washington’s former residence in downtown Philadelphia, has become a flash point in the debate about the Trump administration’s broader effort to change how national parks present U.S. history. President Donald Trump last year directed the Interior Department to examine any exhibits on public lands to ensure they don’t minimize “the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
