{"id":244098,"date":"2026-07-15T16:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T16:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/244098\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T16:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T16:28:08","slug":"national-park-service-replaces-presidents-house-slavery-exhibit-in-philly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/244098\/","title":{"rendered":"National Park Service replaces President&#8217;s House slavery exhibit in Philly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? <a href=\"#Section1\">Let us know!<\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>The Trump administration has completed its overhaul of the President\u2019s House Site on Independence Mall, installing a new exhibit that critics say softens George Washington\u2019s role as an enslaver and shifts attention away from the nine people he held in bondage while living in Philadelphia.\n<\/p>\n<p>Workers replaced the remaining exhibits overnight, possibly ending the fight that pitted the city of Philadelphia against the federal government over who controls the story told at the important historic site.\n<\/p>\n<p>A panel that had been titled \u201dThe Dirty Business of Slavery\u201d has now been replaced by signage that reads \u201dCelebrating Independence Throughout the Years.\u201d\n  <\/p>\n<p>Less than two weeks ago, a <a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/philadelphia-presidents-house-court-ruling-replace-exhibit-trump\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">federal appeals court cleared the way for the National Park Service to replace the exhibit<\/a>. The court concluded that Philadelphia had no legal authority to dictate interpretive content at the federally owned memorial after donating the site to the park service nearly two decades ago.\n<\/p>\n<p>The new exhibit retains references to slavery and the nine people Washington enslaved while serving as president in Philadelphia, but it devotes significantly more space to the history of the executive mansion and the early presidency\n<\/p>\n<p>It also softens George Washington\u2019s views on slavery compared to the previous display.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn 1774, Washington helped draft the Fairfax Resolves at Mount Vernon,\u201d one panel reads. \u201cThese condemned the slave trade as \u2018wicked,\u2019 \u2018cruel,\u2019 and \u2018unnatural\u2019 and called for putting \u2018an entire Stop\u2019 to it. Over time, he became increasingly committed to the gradual abolition of slavery.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>The exhibit also notes that as president, Washington signed legislation that \u201cboth upheld and limited slavery,\u201d including the Fugitive Slave Act, \u201cpassed by a veto-proof majority of Congress, which allowed slaveholders to recapture those who had escaped and penalized anyone who assisted them.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe also signed measures restricting slavery\u2019s expansion, including the 1789 Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, and the 1794 Slave Trade Act, which barred the participation of American ships in the transatlantic slave trade,\u201d that panel reads.\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,724],"class_list":["post-244098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-trump-impact"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}