‘It’s a line that has been crossed’: Philadelphia reacts to the removal of the President’s House site slavery exhibit

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

On Thursday, the National Park Service dismantled and removed exhibits related to slavery at the President’s House site at Independence Hall. Earlier today, a group of about 20 Philadelphia residents visited the site to protest the removal of a piece of history.

“It’s a line that has been crossed,” said Jim Nicholson, of Media. “Slavery is part of our national history, horrific to begin with, but we need to be open and aware of our history and not cover it up. This is an attempt to do just that. And I’m here to witness this.”

Zaire Woods, a 17-year-old Philadelphia high school student, called the incident “messed up.”

“It’s taken away the opportunity for other people to learn about the history and stuff that did happen,” he said. “And it’s been here for so long, so why take it down now?”

“I feel like they’re just taking away our history,” added Nicholas Aappiahene, who is also 17. “It’s not a good act or a good move right now.”

Nearby, flyers of various colors that read “History is real” and “Learn all history” hang from where one of the removed exhibit panels used to be.

The six-panel outdoor exhibit, “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” opened in 2010 after years of community advocacy. The panels examine the paradox between the fight for freedom against British rule and the fact that the movement’s leaders engaged in slavery during the founding of the nation. It explores the lives of the nine people Washington enslaved while living in Philadelphia in addition to more than 300 others held at his Mt. Vernon home in Virginia.

The exhibit was the result of years of campaigning by the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which organized to establish a prominent memorial to the people held in slavery by Washington in Philadelphia as the President’s House project began to take shape.

Roz McPherson, who served as project director during the development of the site, said she learned that the exhibit was being removed “as the site was being dismantled” Thursday afternoon.

“It’s very upsetting because of all of the folks who have worked so hard for so many years on this,” she told WHYY News. “But it was not a surprise, quite frankly.

Where are the panels?

McPherson expressed an interest in retrieving the panels, which are currently in the park service’s possession. She pointed out that the exhibit was not funded or created by the park service or the federal government, but rather by the city and local foundations.

“We raised the funds to create this interpretive exhibit and then when we discovered the archaeology,” she said. “There were both private and public entities that contributed to financing that site. The Park Service did not put up funding. This was a site that they had never intended to acknowledge. When it was completed, the city handed it over to the park service because it is their land.

She added that they now hoped to “figure out some of the intricacies of that entire relationship,” which hadn’t been understood in detail before because “nobody expected to have to go through this.”

Immediate lawsuit

The city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit in federal court Thursday almost immediately after the exhibit was removed. U.S. Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum, the park service and its acting director, Jessica Bowron, are identified as defendants.

In a response to a question about the lawsuit at her Friday morning press conference, Mayor Cherelle Parker said that a 2006 cooperative agreement between the city and the federal government “requires parties to meet and confer if there are to be any changes made to an exhibit.”

“Our city solicitor, Renee Garcia, is working in conjunction with the amazing members of our law department team and working to follow up on that cooperative agreement,” she said. “We will keep you posted as to the results of all of our action.”

U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, D-Philadelphia, said in a statement that he supports the lawsuit “to restore this truthful, accurate, and important exhibit!”

“What the Trump-Vance administration has done to the President’s House exhibit in Philadelphia is an outrage!” the statement reads. “True patriotism requires facing our nation’s past – and learning from it. The Trump-Vance administration may try to whitewash an exhibit, but they cannot erase the shame of what they have done.”

In response to a request for comment, a Department of Interior spokesperson called the lawsuit “frivolous” and reiterated that the park service is “taking appropriate action in accordance to” the president’s executive order, which directed the Department of the Interior to identify and remove national park exhibits that “disparage” America or its founders.

“We encourage the City of Philadelphia to focus on getting their jobless rates down and ending their reckless cashless bail policy instead of filing frivolous lawsuits in the hopes of demeaning our brave Founding Fathers who set the brilliant road map for the greatest country in the world – the United States of America,” the spokesperson said in a statement sent to WHYY News.

Local organizational leaders, such as CAIR-Philadelphia Executive Director Ahmet Tekelioglu, released statements pushing back against that sentiment.

“Honoring the lives and remembering the experiences of the people enslaved at the President’s House is not an act of division, it is an act of truth, education and justice,” Tekelioglu wrote. “To strip away these stories under the guise of ‘protecting shared values’ is nothing less than an attempt to erase uncomfortable but essential chapters of our nation’s history. Our work toward justice and equality demands that we recognize and teach the full, unvarnished truth of our nation’s past.”

For Woods, that also means ensuring a future that doesn’t mimic the past.

“It’s like how my teacher said, ‘You don’t want people repeating the same history,’” he said. “And we got to know about our past.”