{"id":95204,"date":"2026-01-24T02:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T02:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/95204\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T02:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T02:06:08","slug":"philadelphia-reacts-to-removal-of-presidents-house-slavery-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/95204\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia reacts to removal of President’s House slavery exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the National Park Service dismantled and removed exhibits related to slavery at the President\u2019s House site<\/a> at Independence Hall. Earlier today, a group of about 20 Philadelphia residents visited the site to protest the removal of a piece of history.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a line that has been crossed,\u201d said Jim Nicholson, of Media. \u201cSlavery is part of our national history, horrific to begin with, but we need to be open and aware of our history and not cover it up. This is an attempt to do just that. And I\u2019m here to witness this.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Zaire Woods, a 17-year-old Philadelphia high school student, called the incident \u201cmessed up.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s taken away the opportunity for other people to learn about the history and stuff that did happen,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s been here for so long, so why take it down now?\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like they\u2019re just taking away our history,\u201d added Nicholas Aappiahene, who is also 17. \u201cIt\u2019s not a good act or a good move right now.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Nearby, flyers of various colors that read \u201cHistory is real\u201d and \u201cLearn all history\u201d hang from where one of the removed exhibit panels used to be.\n<\/p>\n

The six-panel outdoor exhibit, \u201cFreedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,\u201d opened in 2010 after years of community advocacy. The panels examine the paradox between the fight for freedom against British rule and the fact that the movement\u2019s leaders engaged in slavery during the founding of the nation. It explores the lives of the nine people Washington enslaved while living in Philadelphia in addition to more than 300 others held at his Mt. Vernon home in Virginia.\n<\/p>\n

The exhibit was the result of years of campaigning by the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which organized to establish a prominent memorial to the people held in slavery by Washington in Philadelphia as the President\u2019s House project began to take shape.\n<\/p>\n

Roz McPherson, who served as project director during the development of the site, said she learned that the exhibit was being removed \u201cas the site was being dismantled\u201d Thursday afternoon.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very upsetting because of all of the folks who have worked so hard for so many years on this,\u201d she told WHYY News. \u201cBut it was not a surprise, quite frankly.
\n\"HandwrittenHandwritten signs reading \u201clearn all history\u201d have been attached at the President\u2019s House exhibit in Old City Friday afternoon. (Mark Eichmann\/WHYY)\n<\/p>\n

Where are the panels?<\/p>\n

McPherson expressed an interest in retrieving the panels, which are currently in the park service\u2019s possession. She pointed out that the exhibit was not funded or created by the park service or the federal government, but rather by the city and local foundations.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe raised the funds to create this interpretive exhibit and then when we discovered the archaeology,\u201d she said. \u201cThere were both private and public entities that contributed to financing that site. The Park Service did not put up funding. This was a site that they had never intended to acknowledge. When it was completed, the city handed it over to the park service because it is their land.\n<\/p>\n

She added that they now hoped to \u201cfigure out some of the intricacies of that entire relationship,\u201d which hadn\u2019t been understood in detail before because \u201cnobody expected to have to go through this.\u201d\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…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[13272,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-95204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-old-city","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95204","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=95204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}