Editor’s Note: A version of this story was published in the Winter 2026 issue of Extant, a publication of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.

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As the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the pushback against the Trump administration’s efforts to de-emphasize, or perhaps minimize, the subject of slavery at Independence National Historical Park seems unlikely to subside.

The president’s executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” seeks to rewrite, remove, or restore exhibits and other elements at national parks, monuments, and institutions across the country to stop what the president calls the spread of a “divisive” ideology largely focused on race. Also in the president’s sights: “descriptions, depictions or other content that inappropriately disparage[s] Americans” living or dead.

At Independence National Historical Park, targets are reported to include depictions of the lives of enslaved people, as well as acknowledgements of slavery’s existence, at the President’s House, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Benjamin Franklin House, and the Second Bank of the United States.

While these historic and widely recognized buildings and places in Philadelphia are at the heart of the nation’s struggle for freedom, less well-known locations across the city also offer opportunities to more deeply appreciate the bravery, resilience, and accomplishments of African Americans. These include landmark sites such as Mother Bethel AME Church, founded in 1794 by the formerly enslaved Bishop Richard Allen, the William and Letitia Still House, a former Underground Railroad station operated by Black abolitionists, the Dinah Memorial at Stenton, and the Camp William Penn Museum.

Telling the ‘Whole Truth’

The recreated President’s House at 6th and Market Streets has long raised the ire of some observers. The original dwelling was torn down in the 1830s after serving as the official residence of President George Washington between 1780 and 1788. Philadelphia was then the temporary capital of the United States, and the president and his wife, Martha, had a live-in staff that included nine enslaved people. The president rotated the enslaved workers between his Philadelphia and Virginia homes every six months to exploit a loophole in Pennsylvania’s then-groundbreaking “gradual abolition” law.

According to historians and community advocates, President Donald Trump’s executive order would likely enable a shift in the narrative focus at the house and the other Philadelphia sites. Candor about slavery and similarly complex matters will be truncated or eliminated, while simpler, more traditional paeans to the Founding Fathers will be elevated, they said.

“I disagree with their approach of cherry-picking in order to highlight more positive elements and making that a protocol,” said Alan Spears, a regional director at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy organization. “Talking about slavery in ways that are positive? I’m not sure that’s possible,” Spears said.

What is at stake in Philadelphia and elsewhere, Spears and others believe, are scholarship, community engagement, and continued progress toward inclusion of long-overlooked, under-researched individuals and events in the larger American story. Deeply documented, nuanced narratives centered on the experiences and contributions of enslaved and free Black people, as well as Indigenous and other people of color, are at risk of being officially disappeared.

“All this is symbolic of a larger campaign to erase Black history and dehumanize Black people,” said Michelle Flamer, co-founder and board chair of the historical organization 1838 Black Metropolis. A Pennsylvania Abolition Society census counted nearly 19,000 free Black people living in Philadelphia in 1838. Black Metropolis researches, documents, showcases, and offers tours of locations of African Americans, enslaved and free, living in Philadelphia during the first half of the 19th century. The sites include the Northern Liberties neighborhood, where networks of Black families, tradespeople, and entrepreneurs established businesses, schools, and churches long before the Civil War.

At the southwest corner of 6th and Race Streets, where the American College of Physicians now stands, Pennsylvania Hall–built to house abolitionist meetings–was attacked by a mob and set on fire on May 17, 1838. Educator and civil rights advocate Octavius V. Catto, a monument for whom now stands on the south apron of City Hall, was assassinated outside of his South Street home on October 10, 1871.

“On the eve of the 250th, if you want to say you love America, you need to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing, but the truth. No whitewashing. No censorship,” said Michael Coard, a founding member of the Philadelphia-based Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC). Launched in 2002 to advocate for the President’s House project, ATAC also sponsors educational programs and community events that elevate awareness of Black heritage.

Coard was optimistic that the pushback was having an impact, citing how September 17, 2024, thought to be a “D-Day” for action by the administration, came and went without tangible steps to remove exhibits. The government shutdown in the fall also seemed to pause implementation. “It’s too early to declare victory,” Coard said. “But we have moved the champagne bottle from the refrigerator to the table.”

‘Strongest Possible Opposition’

Black Metropolis and ATAC are among the 49 members of a coalition organized by the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia in response to the president’s initiative. “We thought it was important for historical preservation advocates and advocates from the community to speak with one voice,” explained Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance. “We wanted to defend the accuracy of the scholarship that led to the creation of the exhibits at Independence National Historical Park,” he said. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of support we’ve received from the community.”

The coalition expressed the “strongest possible opposition” to altering content in a letter sent in September to Doug Burgum, director of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service. “These exhibits, including those honoring the lives of the nine individuals enslaved by President George Washington, are the result of a long, hard-fought endeavor to tell the full story of American history,” the letter said in part. “History is not mythology … [and] removal or replacement of the interpretive panels, exhibits and signage under the guise of eliminating anti-American ideology is ahistorical and un-American.” 

First White House Is Also a Slavery Memorial

Information about slavery-related elements at certain Independence National Historic Park sites was brought to the Trump administration’s attention after park employees were encouraged to submit comments, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in July. Flagged materials include an interactive display of information about Benjamin Franklin’s views on slavery, as well as a proposed Independence Hall exhibit featuring versions of foundational documents such as the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. The Inquirer reported that park staff members who submitted comments also flagged six displays that collectively include 13 items, all of them touching on slavery, at the President’s House. In appearing to single out that site, Coard said, the administration “poked the bear. And the bear is roaring back in black and white.”

20 years ago, ATAC galvanized community and political support to ensure that a slavery narrative would be front and center as the house site–a long and unmarked stretch of grass surrounding a public restroom–was being excavated, envisioned, and built. An estimated 300,000 people watched from a platform as the four-month archeological dig uncovered foundations of additions to the original dwelling.

Built with the help of a $3.5 million donation from the Delaware River Port Authority, $3.6 million from the federal government, and $1.5 million from the city, the $10.5 million project, officially named “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a Nation,” opened in 2010. The National Park Service website describes it as telling “the story of the paradox of liberty and enslavement in one home–and in a nation.” Coard and others refer to the site as a Slavery Memorial and President’s House.

Washington’s Legacy Is… Complicated

“It’s hard to believe the Park Service had left that site uninterpreted for decades,” said Ed Lawler, a local historian in Philadelphia. It was Lawler’s exhaustive research into the architectural history of the house that brought to light the accurate number of enslaved people who lived there and details about their lives. He culled the information from letters written by Washington and archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Publication of his article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 2002 helped energize efforts to do archaeological and other research at the site.

“The fact that Washington was an enslaver in Virginia was well known, and the fact of his having brought enslaved people to Philadelphia was known by the park, but not by the public,” said Sharon Ann Holt, a Philadelphian who as editor of the Pennsylvania magazine published Lawler’s article. “The fact that we now had names and stories about these enslaved people, nine human stories, was absolutely dazzling,” she said.

Not everyone was dazzled: “Trashing the President’s House” was the headline on an architectural review in a 2011 issue of Commentary magazine in which critic Michael J. Lewis characterized the site as offering too much slavery and too little presidential history.

“The President’s House site today is not all that it could have been, not by a mile,” Holt wrote in an op-ed the Inquirer published in August. “But it remains one of the most prominent monuments in the nation to openly acknowledge how much American liberty depended on African slavery,” she wrote.

‘Trying to Erase Me’

Mijuel K. Johnson is a guide for The Black Journey, a commercial tour operation in Philadelphia that focuses on a wide range of sites in the Independence National Historic Park and in the 7th Ward. Tours cover portions of the Society Hill, Washington Square West, and South Street West neighborhoods that were the residential, economic, professional, cultural, and spiritual hub of Black Philadelphia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. “This is the first stop on most of our tours,” said Johnson, sitting on a bench in the President’s House. A landmark at the park’s western gateway, the site is mostly outdoors and includes a viewing area of subterranean foundation portions of additions to the original house. “For me, slavery is personal history,” said Johnson, 34, who was born, raised and lives in Philadelphia. “Slavery is part of my own family’s history like it is for a majority of Black people in this country. So, if you’re trying to erase my ancestors, you’re trying to erase me.”

Black Journey owner Raina Yancey established her business in 2019 and is deeply concerned about White House-ordered alterations to Independence National Historic Park sites. “But we are independent and we don’t answer to the federal government,” she said. “So, we will continue to bring tours to the President’s House and talk about the struggle and the triumphs [of Black people].”

While some houses and other buildings included on the tours have been altered or razed, the sites nonetheless illustrate often-overlooked stories about Black institution-building, as does the former home of the Institute for Colored Youth, the predecessor of Cheyney University, which still stands at 9th and Bainbridge Streets.

Yancey said the latest tour offers a look at the history of Black medical education and Black-operated health care facilities in Philadelphia. Key sites include two pioneering hospitals–Douglass at 15th and Lombard Streets and Mercy at 17th and Fitzwater Streets. Black Journey is also developing a food-related tour that will include the site of Cyrus Bustill’s bakery near 2nd and Arch Streets in 1780. Bustill baked bread that helped nourish Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War. “We can’t let these stories go untold,” Yancey said.

Michiko Quinones, who co-founded Black Metropolis, said Northern Liberties was a center of Underground Railroad activity that brought thousands of Black people from slave states north to freedom in Philadelphia. The Black tradespeople, residential property owners, and clergy of Northern Liberties also created a nexus of advocacy for abolition and civil rights. Nearly all of the people and events of this period were ignored by historians of the era–and beyond. The “intentional whiteout of Black history” by white historians and others itself has a long history, explained Quinones. Even when the history mirrors the against-the-odds ethos of the overall American story. “People came out of enslavement and built all this in Northern Liberties,” she said. “What’s not to like?”

Providing a Full Perspective

Marianne Ruane, board president for the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides, said members are encouraged to “tell the true stories, warts and all. No matter what the administration does.”

Johnson and two other tour guides said they make it a point to talk about slavery during stops at the President’s House.

“When I take tourists to the President’s House, I tell them it’s not going to be a Hallmark Channel tour,” said Jim Murphy, 80, who lives in Society Hill and blogs about Philly history.

“I’ve never had anyone get angry at me, even when I tell them how George Washington legally went after Ona Judge [who had escaped to freedom].” Bob Branch is known for doing presentations while in character as Bishop Richard Allen, the founder of Mother Bethel AME. “I’m not about interpretations of history that say white people are evil,” the 72-year-old Philadelphia native said.

However, if the content at the President’s House and the other sites is altered, Branch added, “what would be lost is a full perspective that includes enslavement and racism. “When they made plans for the President’s House, they intentionally made it a priority not to hide what happened there, and that [approach] is good,” he said. He also noted that Allen, who had been enslaved, offered a eulogy for George Washington from the pulpit of Mother Bethel in 1799 because the former president had “intended to free his slaves.”

Edward Stierli, the mid- Atlantic senior regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said Philadelphia has been “a model for what community pushback could look like.”

“The City and the community are calling out the fact that this [move by the administration] is an effort to rewrite history and would be a betrayal of trust with the community that would be an ominous precedent,” he said. “Philadelphia, more than any other place, has drawn the line as far as the story the community wants to be told there. And I believe that story will continue.”

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Editor’s Update: On January 22, 2026, all exhibition panels relating to the history of slavery at the President’s House were removed by National Park Service staff in accordance with an executive order issued by the Trump Administration. The City of Philadelphia has since filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service Acting Director Jessica Bowron. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit on January 27.

During an injunction hearing on January 30, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Marie Rufe ordered the Park Service to safely store the exhibits while the suit plays out in court. She also issued an order prohibiting the Trump Administration from any additional removals or changes to the President’s House until a ruling has been made. 

Avenging the Ancestors Coalition will hold a “Rally to Restore the Truth” on Tuesday, February 10 at the President’s House on Independence Mall. The demonstration begins at 3:30 p.m. See details here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=941864205178925&set=a.118244644207556

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