This article was adapted from a short-form documentary film that the author produced in December 2025.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe announced on Monday that federal courts will grant the City of Philadelphia a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service (NPS). The injunction reverses the NPS’s recent removal of a permanent exhibit at the President’s House site in Independence National Historical Park. The exhibit, which described George Washington’s slaveholding practices, had been the subject of legal and political dispute since an executive order in March 2025 called for the removal of all monuments and memorials in National Parks deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The past year’s controversy was not the first instance in which the President’s House site sparked heated debates in and beyond Philadelphia. The recent struggle over the memorial echoes the contentious discourse around its initial creation in the late 2000s.
The President’s House stands apart from the vast majority of American historic sites in that it is an excavated site, having disappeared from national memory for decades before its discovery in the late 1990s. The house, which served as the country’s first presidential residence during the ten-year period between the establishment of a temporary U.S. capital in Philadelphia and the construction of the city that would become Washington, D.C., was demolished in the 1830s. In an interview with The Phoenix, Philadelphia architectural historian Michael Lewis explained that the building itself had not been considered especially noteworthy by journalists and historians at the time, resulting in a near-complete lack of documentation on its location and dimensions.
It wasn’t until 1997 that the foundation of the former mansion was rediscovered by amateur historian Edward Lawler, Jr. According to Lewis and others, Lawler located the site through independent research at public municipal archives, having been motivated to search for the house when a family member visiting him in Philadelphia asked why George Washington’s home wasn’t marked on the historical maps at city tourism centers.
The excavation of the site from 2000 to 2002 revealed the foundation of a small stable at the back of the house. By cross-referencing Washington’s written correspondence, historians confirmed that nine men, women, and children enslaved by the president had resided in this stable. Further investigation revealed that Washington’s Philadelphia slaveholding had violated a 1788 amendment to Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. The original law had stipulated that enslaved people brought into Pennsylvania by non-residents could claim residency and legal freedom after six consecutive months living in the state. In the 1790s, Washington rotated enslaved individuals between Philadelphia and his Mount Vernon home in order to bypass this ruling, a practice explicitly outlawed by the amendment.
“In case it shall be found that any of my slaves may … attempt their freedom at the expiration of six months, it is my wish and desire that you would send the whole, or such part of them as Mrs. Washington may not [choose] to keep home — for although I do not think they would be benefitted by the change, yet the idea of freedom might be too great a temptation for them to resist,” Washington wrote to executive secretary Tobias Lear in 1791. “At any rate it might, if they conceived they had a right to it, make them insolent in a State of Slavery.”
Lawler published an article detailing his discoveries in the January 2002 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. The new information about the President’s House, particularly its contradictory role as a site of both revolutionary policymaking and unrepentant slaveholding, became a viral story in local and national news media.
When activist and criminal defense attorney Michael Coard learned of Lawler’s story later that year, he was employed as the host of Philadelphia radio station WHAT (AM). Coard reported the story on air, calling for a community organizing effort to ensure that the site’s complicated history was memorialized.
“I have to tell you that I felt betrayed,” Coard said to The Phoenix in a Fall 2025 interview. “I went to arguably the greatest high school in America, Masterman and never heard about it. I went to the oldest HBCU — never heard about it. I went to law school — never heard about it. There was slavery in Philadelphia at America’s first White House. How come nobody talked about it?”
By June 2002, Coard had succeeded in bringing together the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC; pronounced “attack”), a group of predominantly Black activists, academics, and legal officials from across the Greater Philadelphia area. That summer, ATAC began to lobby the NPS for the creation of an exhibition at the President’s House commemorating the nine formerly enslaved there.
“[ATAC’s] name is self-descriptive. Who are the ancestors? The people in the past who were enslaved? What about the avenging part? Many people think that avenging and revenge are synonymous. They’re not. Revenge is to do the same bad thing to you as you did to me, whereas avenge is focused on restoring dignity to the victims. ATAC was simply designed to tell their story: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
ATAC’s grassroots organizing in late 2002 and early 2003 garnered sufficient public attention to secure a series of meetings between coalition representatives and officials from the NPS. Ed Stierli, a NPS senior regional director who was not employed by the agency at the time but has since received internal accounts of the proceedings, told The Phoenix that his predecessors were immediately supportive of the creation of a memorial at the site but pushed back against ATAC’s proposed focus on slaveholding.
“The National Park Service had to be dragged to the table … It was really driven by the city and the community. They fundraised the money for it. They led on the work for it. They did it in partnership with the National Park Service, but it was Michael and his group who were the driving force behind the creation of that exhibit,” Stierli said.
Stierli clarified that many monuments and memorials across the National Parks system are created through similar collaborations between the federal government, local organizers, and private donors.
After years of political, financial, and logistical struggles, construction of the memorial began in early 2009. Black-owned Philadelphia architectural firm Kelly/Maiello designed the physical structure, while a team of academics from institutions across the country co-authored signage to be featured throughout the space. Louis Massiah, a local documentarian and former Swarthmore College Visiting Lang Professor for Issues of Social Change, contributed a series of educational videos for display on several monitors.
The memorial was opened to the public on Dec. 15, 2010. The exhibit, titled “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” was celebrated by ATAC and their sympathizers as the first federal historic site to commemorate the history of enslavement in the United States. Almost immediately, however, the site provoked criticism from academics and lawmakers. Michael Lewis, the architectural historian, authored one of the most prominent critiques of the exhibit for publication in Commentary in April 2011, an essay titled “Trashing the President’s House.”
“People don’t realize that George Washington’s presidency took place almost entirely in Philadelphia,” he told The Phoenix in 2025. “This is the first year of America under the Constitution. We’re deciding what our system of government would be. How centralized will the power of the president be? How does he put together a cabinet? All these big questions are being settled in this house. So an amazing, amazing story, and yet, only the story of slavery was being told there.”
While Lewis emphasized the importance of education on American slaveholding, he argued that the President’s House was the wrong site for the telling of such a history.
Michael Coard oversaw ATAC’s response to this pushback. In his mind, he said, the memorial’s detractors fundamentally misunderstood the politics of representation surrounding the country’s founders.
“It drives me crazy when people make that argument. When I hear people talk about the ‘complete history,’ it’s really amazing how they pick and choose as to what’s complete. There are more monuments and memorials to George Washington than any other human being. So if you have this one site where you say, ‘Hey, let’s level the playing field,’ that feels entirely fair to me.”
For fifteen years after the memorial’s debut, public opinion and federal policy seemed to have ruled decisively in Coard’s favor. With the Trump administration’s March 2025 executive order, however, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the future of the President’s House was once more in jeopardy. A secretarial order with the same name came from the office of Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in May 2025. Burgum’s directive called for the implementation of QR codes at all educational sites in the National Parks system. These QR codes, which appeared throughout the country over the course of the following months, allowed park visitors to flag for removal any content that doesn’t “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
“They were essentially encouraging Americans to snitch on displays or exhibits or monuments that visitors may have felt disparaged fellow Americans. That certainly was unprecedented. There have been controversies and criticisms of monuments, but there has never been a systemic effort to essentially try to distort the history that is taught in National Parks,” said Ed Stierli.
The executive and secretarial orders led to significant public outcry, with many activists and educators expressing concerns about the moral and legal legitimacy of the policies. Nevertheless, federal officials proceeded with the implementation of the orders, and the President’s House was designated a targeted site early in the summer of 2025, with Sept. 17 of that year set as the deadline for the removal of its signage.
In August, ATAC, which had not regularly held rallies or other community events for some time, began hosting public meetings to discuss strategies for the protection of the exhibit. The result was a broader coalition of local organizations and concerned citizens, which Coard dubbed the President’s House/Slavery Memorial Alliance. The Alliance launched a series of initiatives, including political lobbying campaigns, the development of a legal case against Burgum, and grassroots efforts to document the exhibit while it remained on display.
In Nov. 2025, The Phoenix met with Lynda Kellam, a University of Pennsylvania academic who founded the Alliance’s Save Our Signs project to help National Parks visitors collect photos of materials pending removal.
“I’m a little bit worried that we’re having these two parallel truths being created. I don’t think that’s a healthy direction for this country. I’m concerned about the ability of educators, especially K-12 educators, to continue teaching an accurate history of the United States,” Kellam noted.
The most central aspect of the Alliance’s work was organizing frequent protests and rallies at and around the President’s House site in Independence National Historical Park. Since August 2025, Alliance demonstrations have been the focus of news coverage from several major outlets across the country.
“If you’re going to tell us that our history is no longer valid, then we have the right to defend ourselves,” said Matthew Palmer, a Philadelphia area tour guide who became a member of the Alliance. “We have the right to say this history is important. Not only is this history important, here are the many people who have contributed to this history. This is our opportunity to be heard.”
The removal of the exhibit was delayed beyond the September deadline for a variety of reasons. Coard linked the lack of enforcement to ATAC’s protests, with Stierli adding that the government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 further hampered the capacity of federal agencies to implement the secretarial order.
On Jan. 22, 2026, however, all signage was suddenly removed from the site by anonymous federal employees. Philadelphia officials later clarified that the city had not been notified of this action in advance. Due to ATAC’s preparation of a legal injunction case during the preceding months, the City of Philadelphia was able to file a suit against Burgum on the same day. In spite of the extreme weather conditions brought about by Winter Storm Fern, the series of outdoor rallies that immediately followed the exhibition’s removal were among ATAC’s best- attended events since August 2025, The Phoenix verified.
Following four weeks of public demonstrations and legal proceedings, Rufe ruled that the drastic modifications of the memorial had violated the cooperative agreement established between the City of Philadelphia and the federal government in 2006. The agreement stipulated that the exhibit commemorate “all those who lived in the house while it was used as the executive mansion, including the nine enslaved Africans brought by George Washington.”
Rufe’s 40-page opinion memorandum on the case referred to the executive and secretarial orders as “Orwellian,” a comparison separately made by Coard, Stierli, and Lewis as well. The injunction, which instructs the federal government to return all educational materials to Independence National Historical Park, is not a permanent decision and does not contain a deadline for the exhibit’s restoration; the Department of the Interior has also announced a plan for a legal appeal. However, the ruling suggests that Rufe likely believes the City of Philadelphia will emerge victorious from the lawsuit.
Julian Schwartz ’28 contributed to the documentary from which this piece is adapted.
