Philadelphia sues Interior Department over slavery exhibit removal

PHILADELPHIA (CN) — The City of Philadelphia is suing the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service following the federal government’s removal of slavery exhibits from a former presidential home of both George Washington and John Adams.

The exhibits — which honor the nine people Washington enslaved in his Philadelphia home during and after the nation’s founding — had been targeted for removal by President Donald Trump’s administration and the Interior Department as part of a review of national park displays that the administration argues “inappropriately disparage” the United States.

Originally slated for removal on Sept. 17, 2025, National Park Service employees removed the informational panels and shut off video presentations Thursday afternoon.

When asked about the removal by reporters and passersby, one employee repeatedly answered: “I’m just following my orders.”

However, according to Philadelphia officials, those orders were enacted unlawfully and without the city’s permission.

Entitled “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” the now-removed exhibits were originally created as part of a 2006 agreement between Philadelphia and the National Park Service.

Under the agreement, the city and National Park Service had an equal right to approve the exhibits’ final design. And while the city transferred intellectual property rights of the project to the federal agency in 2015, that transfer did not include the right to alter the exhibits, the city said.

“The city’s right to approve the exhibit’s final design, including the interpretive displays, would be meaningless if the NPS could at any time later change or remove the displays without the city’s approval,” the city wrote in its complaint, filed late Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “Moreover, the city’s transference of its copyrights in President’s House to the NPS did not include the authority to materially alter or destroy altogether the exhibit underlying the copyright.”

The city says the Interior Department did not consult or seek approval from Philadelphia officials before removing the exhibits from the President’s House — an act it argues was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.

“The defendants did not engage with the city and do not have the city’s approval to make unilateral changes to the President’s House exhibit, removing the panels referencing the history of slavery at the property,” the city wrote. “Defendants have provided no explanation at all for their removal of the historical, education displays at the President’s House site, let alone a reasoned one.”

City officials seek an order restoring the President’s House site to its status prior to the exhibits’ removal, as well as a preliminary injunction barring the Interior Department from damaging any of the confiscated items.

In a statement to Courthouse News on Friday, an Interior Department spokesperson defended the National Park Service’s removal of the exhibits as in line with a March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

“Following completion of the required review, the National Park Service is now taking appropriate action in accordance with the order,” the spokesperson said. “We encourage the City of Philadelphia to focus on getting their jobless rates down and ending their reckless cashless bail policy instead of filing frivolous lawsuits in the hopes of demeaning our brave founding fathers who set the brilliant road map for the greatest country in the world — the United States of America.”

Described by the National Park Service as “tell[ing] the story of the paradox of liberty and enslavement in one home — and in a nation,” the exhibits highlighted the first U.S. president’s nine enslaved Africans who lived in his presidential home, including Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who fled Washington’s enslavement in May 1796. Washington ordered a manhunt for Judge but was ultimately unsuccessful: She died a free woman in 1848.

“The president’s house in the 1790s was a mirror of the young republic, reflecting both the ideals and contradictions of the new nation,” the federal agency wrote in a description of the exhibits, which remained publicly available online at press time. “The house stood in the shadow of Independence Hall, where the words ‘All men are created equal’ and ‘We the People’ were adopted, but they did not apply to all who lived in the new United States of America.”

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