A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration is within its rights to remove and replace exhibits on slavery at the President’s House site in Philadelphia.
The ruling was issued just over two weeks ahead of planned July 4 celebrations marking America’s 250th anniversary. The city and its historical sites associated with the founding of the nation are preparing for an influx of visitors.
Spokespeople for the U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Park Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment or to questions about their plans for the site ahead of America250 celebrations. But an attorney for the Trump administration told the Third Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month that it had replacement signs ready to be installed.
Whether the Trump administration had standing to remove the exhibits on slavery without consulting the city of Philadelphia has been at the center of a contentious court case since National Park Service workers took them down with little warning in January.
The city of Philadelphia, along with the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and The Black Journey Philadelphia Walking Tour, sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and their respective leaders, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron, the same day.
The signs told the story of nine enslaved people who lived in the Philadelphia home of George Washington during his first term as president, and explored Washington’s legacy as both a slave holder and a founding father of a country grounded in the principle of liberty for all.
District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, agreed to an injunction requested by the city of Philadelphia in February, requiring the U.S. Department of Interior to reinstall signage it had taken down. They’ve remained standing since.
But a panel of judges on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed unanimously to throw out that injunction.
“The City does not have any statutory, property, or contractual rights that empower it to curate the exhibits in the President’s House,” Judge Thomas Hardiman, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in the opinion issued Thursday.
The city also argued that removing the exhibits violated cooperative agreements between it and the National Park Service calling for joint maintenance of the site. Moreover, they claimed the signs’ removal flouted founding documents for the Independence National Historical Park that explicitly note the President’s House site was intended to explore “Paradox of Freedom and Slavery.”
But Hardiman wrote that the Trump administration’s planned replacement panels, which were not made public until images were uploaded to the National Park Service Website in April, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, satisfied the latter demands, and that the city could not claim the right to sue over any change to signage.
Hardiman even praised the proposed new panels, calling them “full of historical context.”
“They acknowledge the evil of slavery, including its injustices and hypocrisies, and, by telling the story of the nine slaves that Washington kept in the President’s House, remind us of their essential humanity,” Hardiman wrote. “They recall the price our Nation paid ‘to finish the work that the Founders had begun and end slavery in the United States once and for all.’”
Following the ruling, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had filed an amicus brief in the case, wrote on social media, “No matter how hard Donald Trump fights in a court of law to whitewash our history, he will never change our values in Pennsylvania.
“We are the birthplace of American democracy. We will continue to learn from our full history, even when it’s painful, to build a better future for all of us.”
Spokespeople for the city of Philadelphia, the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and the Black Journey did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Capital-Star.
This story was originally produced by Pennsylvania Capital-Star, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes New Jersey Monitor, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
