An appeals court on July 3 permitted the National Park Service to proceed with replacing a slavery exhibit at President George Washington’s house in Philadelphia.
The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a mandate after government lawyers asked the court to allow the National Park Service to “begin work immediately and install its new exhibits” at the site.
Government lawyers said in a July 2 motion that the agency has designed “replacement panels” for the President’s House and was prepared to install them once the lower court’s injunction requiring the restoration of removed exhibits was dissolved.
“The President’s House is an important national historical site, and the government submits that the President’s House exhibits should be fully installed without further delay,” the motion stated.
Following the court’s decision, the city of Philadelphia filed a motion on July 3 asking the appeals court to recall its mandate and delay its issuance until at least the deadline to seek rehearing expired.
“Once the government removes or replaces the interpretative materials, the city and the public will lose the benefit of the existing historically grounded interpretation during the very period in which the city is entitled to seek further review. That harm cannot be adequately remedied after the fact,” the motion stated.
The city of Philadelphia sued the National Park Service and the Interior Department earlier this year after the agency removed explanatory panels of the 15-year-old “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” exhibit from walls displayed at the President’s House site, which described the lives of nine African Americans Washington enslaved in the 1790s.
The panels’ removal followed President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Interior Department to ensure that public monuments “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The order states that many national parks promoted what it described as “distorted narrative driven by ideology.”
The city had argued that the unilateral removal broke a 2006 cooperative agreement, the result of work by historians, stakeholders, and community representatives to present the history of the location.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe granted the city’s motion in February and ordered the National Park Service to restore the removed panels at the site. But the Third Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed the injunction on June 18.
In a separate case, a three-judge panel of the Boston-based First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on July 2 stayed a lower court ruling requiring the National Park Service to reinstall exhibits removed from national parks.
Kimberly Hayek contributed to this report.
