Statement regarding the June 18 Third Circuit Court ruling on the President's House

On the eve of Juneteenth, the day we celebrate the end of slavery in the United States, a federal appeals court cleared the way for the National Park Service (NPS) to scrub the President's House exhibit in Independence National Park of the language that explicitly named slavery for what it was and replace it with panels that soften, qualify, and excuse it, in accordance with Executive Order 14263, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. This, in the same year that marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 174 years after Frederick Douglass asked an audience in Rochester, NY what the Fourth of July means to the enslaved, and 163 years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

To be clear, this is the federal government giving permission to the American people to forget. There is nothing restorative about this change to the exhibit language.

The President's House was where George Washington lived and governed our young and supposedly free nation, while he held (at least) nine human beings in bondage, living and laboring against their will. The replacement panels may reference slavery, the Underground Railroad, and Frederick Douglass, but selectively foregrounding Washington's private discomfort with slavery while downplaying the systemic violence of the institution he profited from amounts to erasure, not balance. The exhibit intentionally curates a sanitized story designed to make our painful past more palatable, resulting in a dishonest, whitewashed account of one of the most important and defining eras of our shared history.

The Third Circuit's ruling settles a question of who gets to decide what is told at the President's House. It does not (and cannot) settle the question of what is true. The Independence Hall Association can't stop the NPS from deciding what appears on its own panels but we can refuse to let that be the only account available. USHistory.org will continue to document the full history of the President's House, including the lives of the people George Washington enslaved there, regardless of what is or is not posted on-site. We urge every visitor to Independence National Historical Park to look for what's missing as carefully as they read what's written—and to seek out the history NPS won't tell.

The Independence Hall Association maintains what we said when this exhibit was first dismantled: the history of slavery at the President's House is not a separate or optional chapter of the founding story. It is the founding story. We will continue to advocate for a full and accurate public history at Independence National Historical Park, on this Juneteenth and beyond it.