The Trump administration has secretly replaced a historical exhibit about slavery with a whitewashed one “under the cover of darkness.”
Federal government officials entered the President’s House site at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia to switch out panels in its exhibit on slavery, according to The Washington Post.
The swap occurred sometime overnight between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, according to Michael Coard, a founder of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition.
The panels at the site, which previously told the history of the nine enslaved people who lived with and served George Washington at his Philadelphia home during his presidency, were replaced with plaques that minimized Washington’s ownership of slaves.
One original panel removed from the exhibit, titled “The Dirty Business of Slavery,” called attention to the hypocrisy of the Framers, noting that they “created a document based on the ideal of liberty, but liberty and enslavement were bitterly intertwined.”
The new panels include around 200 references to slavery, but advocacy groups fear they still soften their descriptions, according to the Post.
One new panel in particular stresses Washington’s private discomfort with slavery, as well as emphasizing his measures to both limit and sustain it.
“It’s not going to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” Coard told the Post of the new panels.
The alteration of the exhibit follows a federal court’s ruling earlier this month that reversed a lower court’s February decision to remove the new panels, which had been installed in January.
The three-judge panel of the federal appeals court argued that the new panels were “full of historical context,” despite concerns from city officials and historians.
Reached for comment, an Interior Department spokesperson told the Daily Beast it was “pleased the Courts have sided with the Trump administration on restoring truth and sanity to our country in our nation’s 250th.”
Neither the White House nor the National Park Service immediately returned the Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker called the quiet move “shameful” in a statement shared on Wednesday.
“Overnight, under the cover of darkness, the federal government removed panels at the President’s House that told a thorough history of Philadelphia,” Parker said. “It was allowed to do this by the decision of the federal court, but that it did so at night shows it understands the action is shameful, that it violates community trust. Which it is, and which it does.”
President Donald Trump, 80, issued an executive order last year titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” to wipe ”improper partisan ideology" from federal cultural and historical institutions. Since then, parks across the country have removed historical information on topics including slavery, gender rights, climate change, and racism.
