On Presidents Day — a holiday meant to honor the legacy of American presidents — a federal judge delivered a powerful message to the Trump administration: you do not have the power to erase history.
Senior U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to immediately restore the Philadelphia slavery exhibit: “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” at the President’s House Site.
The open-air exhibit, located within Independence National Historical Park, told the stories of nine people enslaved by George Washington during his time living in the house while Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital in the 1790s.
All 34 panels and video exhibits must be reinstalled. Nothing that was removed can be damaged or destroyed. And no further changes can be made to the site without written agreement from the City of Philadelphia.
What Was Taken Down — and Why It Matters
In January, National Park Service workers arrived at the President’s House with crowbars and began dismantling the Philadelphia slavery exhibit’s educational panels. One of the panels they tore down read “The Dirty Business of Slavery.” The city received no advance notice.
The removal was carried out under Trump’s executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which claims that a so-called “anti-American ideology” has infiltrated the country’s museums, parks, and landmarks. The order describes efforts to honestly teach about slavery and systemic racism as attempts to cast America’s founding principles “in a negative light.”
But the exhibit wasn’t anti-American. It was pro-truth. It honored real people — including Oney Judge, a woman born into slavery at Mount Vernon who escaped from the Philadelphia house in 1796 and fled to New Hampshire. Washington declared her a fugitive and published advertisements demanding her return. The Park Service itself had recognized the site’s connection to the Underground Railroad as recently as 2022.
Removing those stories didn’t protect American history. It tried to bury it.
A Judge Channels George Orwell
Judge Rufe did not mince words. She opened her 40-page opinion with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984, the novel about a totalitarian government that rewrites history to maintain power. Her ruling included one of the most striking lines to come from a federal bench in recent memory:
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”
Rufe found that the exhibit’s removal denied Philadelphia and its visitors “the opportunity to honestly and accurately tell the story of its own history.” She wrote that every person who visits the President’s House without learning about the reality of slavery during the founding era “receives a false account of this country’s history.”
The judge also noted that the Trump administration’s authority over the site was limited. The exhibit was created through a cooperative agreement between the City of Philadelphia and the National Park Service dating back to 2006, and that agreement required disputes to be resolved through communication and compromise — not unilateral action with crowbars.
Philadelphia Fought Back — and Won
The city of Philadelphia filed suit almost immediately after the panels were removed in January. Mayor Cherelle Parker and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro both joined the legal effort. Community organizations, civil rights groups, and historians rallied behind the cause.
On the day the ruling was handed down, about 150 protesters gathered at the President’s House site. When word of the decision spread, they erupted in chants of “We have won! We have won!”
“There’s no other blessing that we could have gotten today beyond this. It’s the ultimate,” said Michael Coard of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, an organization dedicated to honoring the memory of enslaved people.
Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson had captured the stakes earlier in the legal fight: “Removing the exhibits is an effort to whitewash American history. History cannot be erased simply because it is uncomfortable.”
What Comes Next
The Trump administration has not commented on the ruling, and legal observers expect an appeal. The order does not set a specific deadline for the exhibit’s restoration, but it requires immediate compliance.
This case is part of a broader pattern. Since the executive order was signed, the administration has pursued the dismantling of slavery exhibits, the restoration of Confederate monuments, and the erasure of LGBTQ+ history from National Park Service websites. Civil rights advocates warn these actions are designed to reverse decades of social progress by controlling which stories Americans are allowed to learn.
But in Philadelphia — the birthplace of American democracy — a judge reminded the government that the truth is not theirs to hide.
Sources: CBS Philadelphia, NBC Philadelphia, NBC News, Reuters, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Fox 29 Philadelphia
