Trump can’t erase Black history

Philadelphia

Despite broad public opposition, on Jan. 22, National Park Service (NPS) workers carried out orders from President Donald Trump to remove display panels about the history of enslavement in the U.S. at the historic President’s House display in Philadelphia. Trump’s attempts to deny Black history are being challenged by demonstrations, mass Zoom calls and an immediate response from Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), the Black-led group responsible for the display’s creation.

At a press conference on Jan. 28, Michael Coard, leader of ATAC, stated: “If you are Black in America, you know about slavery. You’re enraged about police brutality and mass incarceration. Race is everything in America. Trump can issue his anti-Black executive orders, but he can’t erase history.”

Coard pledged that ATAC will not concede regarding the exhibit’s location or its content. “We are demanding: Save the site, enhance the site and replicate it across this country.”

A City of Philadelphia lawsuit against the federal government’s actions was heard by Judge Cynthia Rufe, representing the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, on Jan. 30. The suit notes that because the memorial bears the names of both the NPS and the City of Philadelphia, the city must be involved in any changes to the site.

On Feb. 2, Rufe inspected the panels, currently stored by the NPS in a facility adjacent to the National Constitution Center. Following the inspection, she issued an order preventing further removals or changes to the President’s House and instructed the city to file a new injunction to clarify what it is seeking. (WHYY, Feb. 3)

‘The Dirty Business of Slavery’

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. He held nine Africans in bondage in Philadelphia, despite prohibitions against enslavement in Pennsylvania.

The graves of some of those enslaved were uncovered in 2002 during the relocation of the Liberty Bell. For eight years, ATAC held recurring meetings and demonstrations demanding that Independence National Historical Park agree to the creation of a prominent Slavery Memorial to highlight the President’s House project. The President’s House Site opened in 2010, funded by city and federal money. Ownership was transferred to the NPS 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 displayed Washington’s hand 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.

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

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.

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 Interior Secretary Doug Burgum determined unduly focused on “how bad slavery was.” (New York Times, Aug. 19, 2025)

They ordered a plaque removed at Muir Woods National Monument in California, that described the beneficial relationship of the planet’s tallest trees in slowing down global warming. They ordered employees at 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 was one of eight Smithsonian institutions under mandatory review with Trump’s Executive Order. Its 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, Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) voiced a 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 neofascists 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 resistance to 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.