A federal court on Monday ordered the National Park Service to reinstall exhibits at the President’s House in Philadelphia that discussed President George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people and included details about the lives of people enslaved by the Washingtons.
After NPS removed panels, displays, and video exhibits that referenced slavery and information about the individuals enslaved at the President’s House on January 22, 2026, the city of Philadelphia sued in federal court to stop the removal and require NPS to restore the exhibits.
Granting the city’s motion for a preliminary injunction, the court ordered NPS to “reinstall all panels, displays, and video exhibits that were previously in place” and to “prevent any additions, removals, destruction, or further changes of any kind to the President’s House site.”
The Paradox of Freedom and Slavery
The court’s 40-page decision explains that the Trump administration’s removal of the exhibit—without the city’s consent—violated federal law and agreements that date back to Congress’s creation of Independence National Historical Park in 1948 to preserve for the benefit of the American people significant historical structures related to the nation’s founding.
The President’s House site started with the discovery of the location of the official residence in Philadelphia where Presidents Washington and Adams lived during their terms.
Historians also identified information about Oney Judge, Austin, Christopher Sheels, Giles, Hercules Posey, Joe Richardson, Moll, Paris, and Richmond—“nine enslaved Africans whom President Washington owned, brought to the official presidential residence, and rotated in and out of Pennsylvania, a practice which prevented enslaved individuals from petitioning for their freedom under Pennsylvania law.”
In 2003, the U.S. House of Representatives urged the park service to commemorate the lives of people enslaved by President Washington at the site, and the city of Philadelphia invested millions of dollars “to tell an honest story about American history and the founding of this country and the role that slavery and enslaved Africans had.”
“President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” opened in December 2010. NPS itself described the site as crucially significant to examine the “paradox of freedom and slavery” at the nation’s founding.
And in 2022, NPS designated it a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site because it was the location where Oney Judge escaped to freedom and it explored “how her struggle for freedom represented this country’s progress away from the horrors of slavery and into an era where the founding ideals of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” could be embodied for every American.”
At a hearing before the federal court, Justice Department lawyers presented “no evidence” or “reasoned explanation” to support the removal of the exhibit. They pointed only to an executive order that directed NPS to review and remove materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans” and specifically cited Independence National Historical Park as a site that promoted “corrosive ideology.”
“Truth Is No Longer Self-Evident”
But NPS had done exactly what the executive order condemned, the court wrote, by “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
“It is not disputed that President Washington owned slaves,” the court wrote. “And yet, in its argument, the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.”
The government’s argument brought to mind George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” in which a Ministry of Truth, with the motto “Ignorance is Strength,” was empowered to “track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded” and to destroy or rewrite them to suit the government, the court wrote.
“The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of
the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean,
hidden, or overwritten,” the court found. “And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”
Lawyers from the Justice Department argued that “the Government gets to choose the message it wants to convey.”
“An agency … cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership,” the court ruled. And the government is free to “convey[] whatever message it wants to send by wiping away the history of the greatest Founding Father’s management of persons he held in bondage” elsewhere.
Irreparable Harm
The city argued that irreparable harm would result if the displays are not restored and safeguarded, as the city would suffer “a loss of access to historical truth, an undermining of the public trust, and an inability to recount its own story in preparation for the semiquincentennial.”
The court agreed, finding that the removal “constitutes erasure, undermines public trust, and compromises the integrity of public memory.”
The President’s House represents the City “fulfilling an obligation to tell the truth—the whole, complicated truth.” Removal of the crucial interpretive materials strips the site of that truth and deprives the public of educational opportunities designed to be free and accessible.
Importantly, the court found that all visitors would be harmed by the removal of the displays and exhibits, which the court emphasized “were not mere decorations to be taken down and redisplayed.”
[R]ather, they were a memorial to “men, women, and children of African descent who lived, worked, and died as enslaved people in the United States of America,” a tribute to their struggle for freedom, and an enduring reminder of the inherent contradictions emanating from this country’s founding. Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.