As you may have seen, earlier this afternoon (Thursday), NPS staff removed interpretive panels telling the story of George Washington’s enslavement of nine people while serving as President in Philadelphia. The exhibit had been under scrutiny from the Trump administration for months for potentially violating his executive order demanding the removal of histories that might “inappropriately disparage” famous Americans. Despite efforts to save it, today they tore it off the walls.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a great story about the removal, along with the city and community response, which you can find here.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, and have discussed here, Americans have been fighting over how (or whether) to publicly discuss this history from the very beginning. While some Americans try to erase Washington’s ties to slavery, others lift it up for criticism to shine a light on the persistence of racial injustice. Still others focus instead on Washington’s emancipation of the people he enslaved in his will as a kind of absolution.

Yet we’ve never agreed on slavery’s place in Washington’s legacy because we’ve never agreed on what America, or democracy, or justice should mean either. Washington remains—has always been—an endlessly flexible symbol, someone whose history with slavery is just ambiguous enough to be cherry picked and wielded in service of contemporary cultural or political fights.

I’ll have an essay exploring this in greater depth soon, and will post a note here when its published. I’ll also be doing a Substack Live with on Friday, 1/23 at Noon ET, where we’ll discuss this further.

Even if it’s not surprising, I had a visceral reaction watching these exhibits be literally torn from the walls. I hope my book can help us understand a bit more clearly how we got here, and how we might proceed moving forward.

JM