Less than a week after Clint Smith wrote in The Atlantic about the need for private museums to preserve history, the National Park Service removed content from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia that referenced slavery and the challenges faced by enslaved people.
The outdoor exhibit was at the President’s House Site, where George and Martha Washington lived when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. The informational panels discussed Washington’s ownership of enslaved people and included details about the lives of people enslaved at the site, as well as information about the broader history of slavery.
The exhibit, “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” had been on display for more than 15 years. According to the Park Service website, it examined “the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation.”
Workers tore down the exhibit Thursday, using crowbars to pull down plaques that described Philadelphia’s role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and included biographical details about the nine people enslaved by the Washingtons at the president’s mansion.
On Friday morning, only their engraved names—Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll, and Joe—remained.
The removal follows President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order directing the Park Service to review and remove materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans” and specifically citing Independence National Historical Park as a site that promoted “corrosive ideology.”
The city of Philadelphia sued the Interior Department and the National Park Service in federal court on Thursday to stop the permanent removal of the display, AP reported.
The city argues that removing the exhibit violates a 2006 agreement in which the Park Service stipulated that the site would “commemorate the enslaved Africans who resided in the Washington household,” and that the city could approve or reject changes to the displays, according to The New York Times.
“Their shameful desecration of this exhibit raises broader, disturbing questions about this administration’s continued abuse of power and commitment to whitewashing history,” Rep. Dwight Evans, whose district includes the city, told AP.
“African American history is American history, and this is an intentional effort to erase history and whitewash,” Kenyatta Johnson, the president of the Philadelphia City Council, told The New York Times.
In September, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had ordered the removal of content related to slavery at several national parks, including an iconic photograph that exposed the brutal violence of slavery as well as signs at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia. The President’s House Site was also identified as being out of compliance with Trump’s order.
The Park Service is now stepping up its implementation of the directive, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times, after the Trump administration set a new January deadline for many parks to remove or rewrite all “inappropriate” content.
Park Service employees at Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts have been ordered to stop showing films about the terrible conditions endured by women and immigrants working in textile mills in the early 19th century, The Times reports.
And the Park Service already has purged its gift shops of supposedly DEI-related merchandise and removed the two official federal holidays that honor Black history—Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth—from its list of free entrance days.