In accordance with section one of Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the slavery exhibit at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park was removed on Jan. 22.
The exhibit, “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” was once displayed in the first President’s House, where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived during their terms. It was placed there to memorialize the nine slaves Washington brought with him from his home in Mount Vernon.
The original goal of the exhibit, as outlined by the 2005 site review written by the Organization of American Historians, was to “Use the park’s many opportunities for presenting race and slavery to audiences. The President’s House site, for instance, is an opportunity to present not only slaves in Washington’s household but the issue of slavery in Washington’s world.”
The exhibit featured multiple panels on each wall, detailing how people were enslaved to sustain “dirty business,” such as the slave trade. It highlighted the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence, which states “all men are created equal,” while the authors went against those very words.
The exhibit not only said the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington, but also informed visitors of their lives with biographical details about each of them.
In September 2025, 45 Philadelphia organizations had signed a letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum urging him to “abandon these politically motivated efforts to sanitize our past.”
However, the letter had done little to stop Burgum from ordering the National Park Service to dismantle the exhibit.
Now, all that remains of the exhibit in the President’s House are the empty panels and the names of the nine slaves, which are engraved in a cement wall next to the structure, including Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll and Joe (Richardson).
In the following days, local teachers reportedly came to see the empty panels and left multicolored construction paper taped in the spaces. On the papers, they wrote “Learn ALL history,” “history is real” and the names of the enslaved.
Since the removal, the city of Philadelphia has sued both Burgum and Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker cited that the removal of the exhibit broke a two-decade old agreement between the federal government and the city that “requires parties to meet and confer if there are to be any changes made to an exhibit.”
The exhibit was just one of many that are beginning to disappear in the lead up to the nation’s 250th anniversary in July.
The New York Times reported that the Lowell National Historical Park was ordered to stop showing films “about the women and immigrants who once toiled in the city’s textile mills” and park services throughout the states have been ordered to take down plaques that correspond to climate change or anything else that might “disparage Americans.”
