Trump Whitewashes George Washington’s Slavery History in New Display

Federal officials installed revised interpretive panels at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park on Wednesday, July 15, after a court fight over the Trump administration’s removal of an outdoor exhibition about slavery. The new texts replace “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” a 2010 outdoor exhibition at the President’s House site that was removed in January under an order to avoid exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” though a court required restoration of exhibits. Activist attorney Michael Coard of the Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), which joined Philadelphia’s lawsuit, said the revised panels “sanitized” and minimized the Founding Fathers’ involvement in slavery, including by emphasizing George Washington’s role in the 1774 Fairfax Resolves while omitting mention of the hundreds of people he enslaved. Coard also criticized language suggesting enslaved people in Washington’s Philadelphia household had a “greater modicum of autonomy,” while ATAC has campaigned since 2002 for a permanent memorial to nine individuals Washington enslaved at the site; in February, Judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the exhibition restored and compared the administration’s tactics to George Orwell’s “Big Brother.”

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