Appeals court says Trump administration can halt work on slavery exhibit in Philadelphia amid appeal

PHILADELPHIA — A U.S. appeals court late Friday said the Trump administration can halt work on a National Park Service slavery exhibit in Philadelphia while it appeals an order to reinstall it.

About half of the large panels at the outdoor exhibit have been restored this week at the site of the former President's House on Independence Mall. U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman, in his order, said the exhibit as it stood Friday must remain in place and the remaining materials must be preserved. The appeals court will now weigh the dispute between the city and the federal government, which began when the administration abruptly removed the exhibit in January, amid an effort to remove information it deems “disparaging” to Americans from federal properties.

Senior U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe had set a 5 p.m. Friday deadline to restore exhibits on the lives of nine people enslaved at the site under former President George Washington in the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital. That order is now on hold.

The Park Service describes the exhibit as one “that examines the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation.”

The Interior Department has said in court papers that it planned to replace it with its own narrative on slavery. Rufe had said it must work with the city on any new material under a longstanding 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.