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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A U.S. appeals court ruled late Friday that the Trump administration can temporarily stop the progress on a National Park Service exhibit about slavery in Philadelphia. This decision comes as the administration seeks to overturn a prior mandate to reinstall the display.
This week, approximately half of the exhibit’s large panels were reinstated at the former President’s House site on Independence Mall. In his latest directive, U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman stated that the current state of the exhibit should remain unchanged, and the remaining materials must be preserved. The appeals court is set to deliberate on the conflict between the city of Philadelphia and the federal government, which erupted after the administration unexpectedly dismantled the exhibit in January. The removal was part of a broader initiative to eliminate content deemed “disparaging” to Americans from federal sites.
Previously, Senior U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe had imposed a 5 p.m. Friday deadline to reinstall exhibits chronicling the lives of nine individuals enslaved at the site during George Washington’s presidency in the 1790s when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. That directive is now paused.
The National Park Service describes the exhibit as an exploration of the contradiction between slavery and freedom during the nation’s founding.
The Interior Department, in court filings, expressed its intention to replace the exhibit with its own interpretation of slavery. Judge Rufe had previously emphasized that any new content should be developed in collaboration with the city, in line with an established cooperative agreement.
“(T)he government can convey a different message without restraint elsewhere if it so pleases, but it cannot do so to the President’s House until it follows the law and consults with the city,” Rufe, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, wrote in an opinion Friday.
In its own filing Friday to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department called her ruling “extraordinary” and “an improper intrusion on the workings of a co-equal branch of government.”
One of the panels being rehung Friday morning — titled “History Lost & Found” — details the surprising discovery of artifacts from the President’s House during an archaeological dig in the early 2000s, as work was being done on a new pavilion for the Liberty Bell.
The exhibit had been on display since 2010, the result of years of research and collaboration between the city, the Park Service, historians and other private parties.
Rufe said the federal government was unlikely to succeed at trial. And she said the public –- and the city’s reputation — was being harmed with each passing day.
The city, she said, “is responsible for the public trust in the city’s telling of its own history, its own integrity in telling that history, and preventing erasure of that history, particularly in advance of the semiquincentennial.”
Millions of people are expected to visit Philadelphia, the nation’s birthplace, this year for the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding in 1776. Hardiman said the court would expedite the appeal, but the legal wrangling is still expedited to continue for another month or more, according to a schedule he set.
Kimberly Gegner, a teacher from Philadelphia, visited the site Friday with some of her 6th- to 9th-grade students. As a Black American, she said, it had pained her to see the history removed. But she was grateful to see it going back up.
“This whole case and what happened here — the taking it down and how Mayor Parker and other Pennsylvanians had to go to court to have it restored — is an excellent case of how the Constitution was applied to win this case for Philadelphia,” she said.