Trump removes historic depiction of enslavement

Philadelphia

Despite broad public opposition, on Jan. 22 National Park Service (NPS) workers carried out orders from President Donald Trump to remove over a dozen display panels about the history of enslavement in the U.S.

The panels, under the general theme, “The Dirty Business of Slavery,” were first installed at the site of the President’s House that marks the location where the first U.S. president, George Washington, lived during most of his two terms of office and held nine Africans in bondage in Philadelphia, despite Pennsylvania prohibitions against enslavement.

The graves of some of those enslaved were uncovered in 2002 during the relocation of the Liberty Bell. A Black-led group, Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) held recurring meetings and demonstrations for the next eight years to demand that Independence National Historical Park agree to the creation of a prominent Slavery Memorial to highlight the President’s House project.

Funded by Philadelphia and federal money, the President’s House Site was opened in 2010 and later transferred to NPS ownership in 2015.

The panels tell the stories of the nine enslaved people: Austin and Paris — horsemen and stable hands; Hercules — the chief cook; Christopher Sheels — Washington’s personal attendant; Richmond — Hercules’ son and kitchen worker; Giles — a driver and stable hand; Ona Marie Judge — Martha Washington’s personal maid; Moll — nursemaid to the Washington’s grandchildren; and Joe Richardson — a stable hand.

The display highlights Washington’s signing of the infamous 1793 Fugitive Slave Act that put those who escaped enslavement at risk of recapture for the rest of their lives. Artwork that was on display before Jan. 22 showed Washington’s hands holding a quill signing the act, with a posse of white men with clubs and guns in the background shooting at four Black men escaping from enslavement. After this act was signed, Ona Marie Judge successfully escaped enslavement by the Washingtons in 1796.

The exhibit, first targeted by Trump in May 2025, focused on the contradictory coexistence of liberty (for whites) and enslavement for Africans. One panel called “Life Under Slavery” illustrated the whippings, deprivation of food, clothing and shelter, beatings, torture and rapes endured by enslaved people.

Trump’s racist, white supremacist executive order called for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “ensure” that content which “inappropriately disparages” U.S. individuals past or living ceases to exist at national parks, including Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. In 2026, this park will be at the center of the celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary.

Michael Coard, leader of ATAC, in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer on Jan. 22, called the removal of the displays an “abomination” and called Trump a “monstrosity in the White House.”

“It’s a disgrace, and that’s an understatement,” Coard said. “I cannot say what I’m thinking, because as a criminal defense attorney, I know better. What’s going on now is absolutely unheard of in the history of the United States of America.”

The President’s House was designated a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site by a 1998 act of Congress. The Trump administration has removed the exhibits referencing enslavement without statutory authority.

Coard pledged that ATAC will not concede regarding the exhibit’s location or its content, despite efforts from federal officials to erase the outdoor museum. (Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 25)

Broad strokes of Trump attacks

Last May, all 433 National Park Service installations and other Interior Department holdings were given a mid-September 2025 deadline to “rid exhibits, signs, films and bookstores of statements and literature” that Trump and Burgum determined unduly focused on “how bad slavery was.” (New York Times, Aug. 19, 2025)

But covering up the U.S. racist history was not their only goal.

In California, at Muir Woods National Monument, they ordered a plaque removed that described the beneficial relationship of the planet’s tallest trees in slowing down global warming. They ordered the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts to stop showing films about the women and immigrants exploited in that city’s textile mills.

Native News Online noted Sept. 8 that the National Museum of the American Indian — with locations in New York City and Washington, D.C. — was one of eight Smithsonian institutions under audit with Trump’s order. The goal was to sugarcoat history while glorifying the crimes of white European settler colonialists.

The Indigenous news service reported that at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in early September, U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) gave voice to a far-right, settler-colonial false narrative that “America was founded by and intended for Europeans.”

Alluding to the Manifest Destiny doctrine, Schmitt claimed: “We’re a nation of settlers, explorers and pioneers — born on the ocean waters that carried the first ships to our shores and forged in the crucible of a wild frontier. Our people tamed a continent, built a civilization from the wilderness and wrote our nation’s name in history.”

But the true history that Trump, Schmitt and other neo fascists want to wipe away is the genocidal attacks that these settler colonialists carried out against Indigenous peoples, equating Indigenous resistance to “barbarism,” much like Israel does today with the Palestinian Resistance.

Dismantling historic monuments will not eradicate the over 400 years of racism, colonialism, white supremacy and imperialism in the U.S. It won’t change the facts that Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, workers and immigrants organized and fought back, often together.

The murderous occupations of Minneapolis and other U.S. cities by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today only serve to underscore that the class struggle will continue until capitalism and imperialism are finally swept into the dustbin of history.