Manipulating the truth at the President’s House is not restoration — it’s revision
Earlier this year, the National Park Service tried and failed to erase history in Philadelphia. Now it seeks to soften and sanitize George Washington’s deep involvement in slavery.
On Jan. 22, workers from the National Park Service arrived at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia and used crowbars to rip down 34 interpretive panels telling the truth about slavery at America’s first “White House.”
Those panels stood at the very site where President George Washington, from 1790 to 1797, illegally enslaved nine African descendants in Philadelphia — nine of the 316 African descendants he held in bondage at his Mount Vernon, Va., plantation.
The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), founded in 2002, led the effort to ensure this history would not be hidden. After eight years of relentless protesting, rallying, and petitioning, ATAC — working alongside a broad coalition of historians, activists, elected officials, and community members — forced the federal government to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” That work led to the 2010 opening of the first slavery memorial of its kind on federal property in the United States.
That memorial was never meant to be symbolic alone. It was intended to serve as a permanent public acknowledgment of a painful truth too often ignored — one that required courage, persistence, and collective action to bring to light in the first place.
And yet, despite that history, NPS never contacted ATAC — nor asked for our input — before removing the panels or proposing replacements. That omission is not just disrespectful, it is revealing. It signals a willingness to sideline the very voices and communities who fought to ensure this history was told accurately and completely.
On April 7, NPS posted nearly a dozen new digital panels online. These were not restorations. They were revisions — an attempt to soften and sanitize George Washington’s deep involvement in slavery, recasting a man who enslaved African men, women, and children from the age of 11 until his death as someone merely “uncomfortable” with the institution. They even suggest the enslaved in Philadelphia experienced a “modicum of autonomy.”
No one — no president, no administration — has the right to dictate what history we tell. The truth is not optional.
Let’s be clear: There is no autonomy in enslavement.
If Washington felt “discomfort,” imagine the lived reality of the 316 African descendants he held in bondage. If NPS believes “autonomy” applies to human beings in chains, then it fundamentally misunderstands the brutality of slavery.
This is not restoration. It is revision.
It is an offensive attempt to distort American history at one of the only federal sites that directly acknowledges the lives of the nine enslaved African descendants held by Washington in Philadelphia. It also undermines the years of bipartisan support and public engagement that made this memorial possible, and that continues to affirm the importance of telling this history truthfully.
And it is exactly why ATAC’s work remains as necessary today as it was more than 20 years ago. We fought to create this memorial so the truth would be told — fully and honestly. We will not stand by while that truth is erased.
No one — no president, no administration — has the right to dictate what history we tell. The truth is not optional.
Although those in power may try to control the present — and distort the past — their efforts will not stand.
Because, as William Cullen Bryant wrote, and as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later reminded us, “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.”
Michael Coard is a civil rights attorney and founder of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), which led the successful effort to establish the President’s House slavery memorial at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
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