Senator Art Haywood of Abington Township published an opinion piece last week in The Philadelphia Tribune titled “Exhibit’s removal is a harmful act of enslavement denial“.

Haywood is referencing the National Park Service’s removal of a slavery exhibit from the President’s House at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall in late January. The exhibit was taken down in accordance with President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order which states that the government must “take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties within the Department’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

Haywood wrote that their removal “is an act of enslavement denial that mirrors the mechanics of Holocaust denial. By dismantling this site of ‘hard history,’ we inflict irreparable harm on the legitimacy and dignity of Black Americans.”

An excerpt:

Both enslavement denial and Holocaust denial operate through the same insidious toolkit: they downplay, distort, or outright reject the brutal reality of systemic mass murder and forced labor. Just as Holocaust deniers seek to minimize the scale of its atrocities to shield a specific ideology, the removal of enslavement exhibits seeks to “whitewash” the American narrative.

This removal is a secondary act of violence. When we erase the physical evidence of the nine people enslaved by George Washington at the very site of the executive branch’s infancy, we do more than commit an injustice; we deny Black people their rightful place in the founding of our nation. By hiding the evidence of their presence, the state reinforces the myth that the “cradle of liberty” was built without their forced labor. This erasure suggests that the Black experience is a footnote rather than a foundational pillar of the American project.

Governor Josh Shapiro filed an amicus brief on January 27 in support of the City of Philadelphia’s federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and other federal entities.

“There is no virtue in refusing to acknowledge certain aspects of our history because it is painful to do so,” the amicus brief says. “The removal of the slavery exhibit from the President’s House undermines this commitment and denies Pennsylvanians and others the opportunity to learn more about a part of our history that cannot be ignored.”

According to NBC10, a rally called “Restore the Truth” was held on Tuesday at the President’s House calling for the return of the exhibit.

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