OPINION:
On June 18, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Philadelphia has no legal authority over the exhibits at the President’s House site, allowing the Trump administration to proceed with replacing the slavery memorial panels removed there in January.
The decision unwinds a February order from Judge Cynthia Rufe requiring the National Park Service to restore panels naming the nine people George Washington enslaved in Philadelphia.
The President’s House sits steps from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, atop a service passage built to keep enslaved people out of sight. That juxtaposition makes the case for a national truth and reconciliation commission better than any argument could.
Washington rotated enslaved members of his household back to Mount Vernon to skirt a Pennsylvania law freeing enslaved people who resided in the state for six months and a day. He later pursued Oney Judge, Martha Washington’s enslaved maid, for years after she fled to New Hampshire, refusing her terms for eventual freedom.
That is a hard truth about America’s first president and first l
Acknowledging that hypocrisy and contradiction, not iltigating around it, is what Americans owe themselves if they want to understand how the nation came to be.
It has been more than four centuries since enslaved Africans arrived on these shores, and the U.S. has never undertaken a formal, state-backed reckoning with that history. Sixteen other nations, South Africa, Germany and Sierra Leone, have built such frameworks.
America, marking its 250th birthday this week, has not.
The cost of that avoidance isn’t abstract. Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white Americans, and median Black household wealth remains a fraction of the white median.
A commission should also make room for something harder: structured testimony from reformed white supremacists and witnesses to racial terror, not as a path to rehabilitation, but as a way of putting the actual mechanics of that violence on the record, in the presence of the communities who lived it.
The fight over a handful of wall panels was never really about the panels. It was about who gets to narrate America’s founding.
RICHARD ROMM
West Sussex, United Kingdom
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