A federal judge in Pennsylvania has ordered the Trump administration to reinstall several exhibits about slavery that were removed from the President’s House Site in Philadelphia last month.
In a preliminary injunction issued Monday, Feb. 16, Judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to restore the site — which features part of the foundation of the former mansion where George Washington and John Adams lived during their presidential terms — to the way it was before the the exhibits were removed on Jan. 22. Rufe did not, however, give a firm deadline for the restoration.
The exhibits were targeted under a directive that Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, issued last year ordering the review and potential removal of any displays at national parks that “inappropriately disparage” the United States. Last July, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that 13 items across six exhibits at the President’s House were flagged for review. But in January, everything displayed at the site was removed.
Since its commemoration in 2010, the President’s House Site has expressly examined the “paradox between slavery and freedom in the new nation,” as a description on the National Park Service website still reads. It also serves as a memorial to the nine people Washington enslaved there during the founding of the U.S.
The City of Philadelphia sued Burgum and acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron after the exhibits were removed. In granting the city’s request for an injunction, Rufe said that the Department of the Interior and NPS must “take all necessary steps to ensure the safety, security, and preservation of any such items” removed from President’s House. She also prohibited the defendants from “making any and all further changes to the President’s House Site, including the installation of replacement materials, without mutual agreement of the City of Philadelphia” as the case continues.
Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, also pointedly opened her decision with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”
The judge went on to write: “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”
The Department of the Interior and the National Parks Service did not immediately return requests for comment.
While the preliminary injunction does not fully settle the case, Rufe has signaled her intention to move quickly, in part to have the matter decided before this summer’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Independence Mall (where the President’s House is located). Even before today’s decision, Rufe had appeared unlikely to side with the Trump admin. At a hearing last month, for instance, she called the government’s argument that the president had full power to change national parks exhibits “horrifying” and “dangerous” (per the Inquirer).
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
