As the descendant of enslaved people, I mourn the Fourth of July.
However, Independence Hall has a prominent place in Black history.
Independence Hall is the place where the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence; 34 of the 56 signers, including Thomas Jefferson, enslaved Black people.
Independence Hall is the place where the U.S. Constitution, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person and mandated that freedom seekers be returned to bondage, was signed.
Independence Hall is the place where, from 1850 to 1854, hearings were held to return the self-emancipated to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Independence Hall is the place where master silhouette artist Moses Williams worked “every day and evening.”
I have nominated Moses for a Pennsylvania historical marker. If the nomination is approved, the marker will be installed near Independence Hall in 2026.
For updates on Moses Williams’ nomination and walking tour, send your name and email address to phillyjazzapp@gmail.com.
The Philadelphia 76ers abandoned their plan to build an arena atop SEPTA’s Jefferson Station. But SEPTA is still playing games to block disclosure of communications with the Sixers’ billionaire owners and their representatives.
SEPTA lost their appeal of the Office of Open Records’ Final Determination to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania. The beleaguered transit agency was directed to conduct a good faith search for records responsive to my Right-To-Know Law request for, among other things, invoices, reports, feasibility studies, traffic impact studies, architectural designs and cost estimates.
In a sworn statement, Allison DeMatteo, SEPTA’s Manager of Records and Information, claimed her search using the keywords “76 Place” and “76 Devcorp” returned 7.60 gigabytes of data, including 5.71 gigabytes of email.
According to ChatGPT, one gigabyte of email data is roughly 100,000 pages. As of this writing, SEPTA has produced 30 records.
Meanwhile, the City of Philadelphia has petitioned the OOR to reconsider its final determination, dated May 30, 2025. The OOR should tell the City: We said what we said. “[T]he appeal is granted in part and denied in part, and the City is required to provide unredacted responsive records, as designated in this Final Determination, to the Requester within thirty days.”
UPDATE: Office of Open Records Deputy Chief Counsel Kathleen A. Higgins to the City of Philadelphia: The Petition is DENIED:
Therefore, after a review of the complete appeal file, including the Final Determination Upon Remand and the arguments set forth in the Petition, the record indicates that all evidence and submissions before the OOR were considered and given proper weight, and as a result, I cannot conclude that the Appeals Officer committed an error of law or an abuse of discretion. Accordingly, the Petition is DENIED.
In other words, the City of Philadelphia got to give it up.
Memorial Day is a time to remember and honor military personnel who paid the ultimate sacrifice to protect the nation’s freedoms and democratic ideals.
The DEI – Didn’t Earn It – crowd that’s attacking diversity, equity and inclusion likely doesn’t know the origin of Memorial Day. Originally called Decoration Day, Memorial Day was first observed on May 1, 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina.
Thousands of African Americans, including formerly enslaved, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, were led by children as they gathered to honor 257 Union soldiers who were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand of the city’s Washington Race Course. The ancestors exhumed the mass grave, reburied the bodies and decorated their graves; hence, Decoration Day.
Check out the history of Memorial Day that President Trump wants to erase.
On August 1, 2023, I filed a Right-To-Know Law request for records related to the Sixers’ now-abandoned proposal to build a basketball arena atop Jefferson Station. SEPTA denied the request, claiming the entirety of my Request was “insufficiently specific.”
I appealed the denial to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records. The OOR determined that several Items were sufficiently specific and ordered SEPTA to conduct a good faith search for the records on December 20, 2023.
Rather than comply with the OOR’s final determination, the cash-strapped public transit agency paid outside counsel to appeal the order to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.
On May 1, 2025, the Commonwealth Court affirmed the OOR’s findings, stating that my Request was sufficiently specific, in part. SEPTA was, again, directed to conduct a good faith search for records responsive to my Request for, among other things, invoices, reports, feasibility studies, traffic impact studies, architectural designs and cost estimates.
The Commonwealth Court effectively said game over. Like the 76ers playing in the second round of the NBA playoffs, SEPTA blew its chance to assert any exemptions from disclosure. SEPTA must give up 76 Place records.
While still a British colony, South Carolina passed the first law that denied enslaved Africans the right to learn. The Negro Act of 1740 outlawed teaching enslaved people to read. President Trump threatens to withhold federal funding from schools that teach uncomfortable truths about American history.
Across the country, churches, civil rights organizations, activists and concerned citizens are speaking up and resisting efforts to erase Black history. We have come too far to go back.
The Freedom to Learn Network, convened by the African American Policy Forum, has launched the National Week of Action to resist Trump’s attempt to erase Black history, and defend our freedom and right to learn.
The activations include a #HandsOffOurHistory gathering in DC on Saturday, May 3, 2025.
With little fanfare, President Trump has tapped Hillsdale College to produce a video series, “The Story of America.” A member of the Project 2025 network, the conservative Christian college’s demographically monochromatic faculty and student body does not look like America.
Moses Williams was enslaved by Charles Willson Peale whose portrait of George Washington is prominently displayed in Trump’s tricked out Oval Office. The title of my presentation is “Mapping Moses Williams’ Philadelphia.”
On Friday, April 25, historian and artist Nell Irvin Painter will give a keynote address, “Arrived, New Names.” Painter “will set the tone for exploring how creative projects can share complicated and compelling histories.”
On Saturday, April 25, public historians, educators, artists, preservationists and community members will share strategies on how they are breathing life into the archives to tell untold or undertold stories, and stories of belonging.
The event is open to the public. To register, go here.
President Trump’s latest diktat claims there is “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is in the crosshairs. First proposed by Black Civil War veterans, NMAAHC was more than 100 years in the making. The Smithsonian museum traveled a “long road to hard truth.”
Trump’s “corrosive ideology” is the hard truth about American history.
[Black] history … contains the truth about America. It is going to be hard to teach it.
[…]
I am the flesh of your flesh and bone of your bones; I have been here as long as you have been here – longer – I paid for it as much as you have. It is my country, too. Do recognize that that is the whole question. My history and culture has to be taught. It is yours.
[…]
Everyone has basic emotions of hate, fear, and love, and I think the whites in this country have used the machinery of propaganda very skillfully. You find blacks who want to know something about their history and you find whites who don’t understand or who are fearful. They will publicize this sort of thing as a hate gathering and a hate meeting, when actually it could possibly be a historical meeting that whites and blacks could learn from.
From the forced removal of indigenous people to the enslavement of Africans, “race-centered ideology” is woven into the fabric of the nation.
Signer of the Declaration of Independence and second President of the United States John Adams said:
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
Slaveholder Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. It is an objective fact that Jefferson was accompanied by his enslaved personal servant, Robert Hemmings.
It is an objective fact that the nation’s founding principles did not include Black people. It is a national shame that “our shared past” includes ratification of the U.S. Constitution that counted the enslaved as three-fifths of a person.
It is an objective fact that George Washington hounded self-emancipated Ona Judge until the day he died.
It is an objective fact that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings.
It’s Sunshine Week but there’s nothing but clouds in Washington, where President Trump and Elon Musk are spreading chaos and sowing fear. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has illegally fired tens of thousands of federal employees, including 1,000 National Park Service workers.
Judge William Alsup ordered the immediate reinstatement of unlawfully terminated employees:
It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that is a lie.
A group of NPS rangers is fighting back. The Resistance Rangers said in a statement:
Resistance Rangers will not see this ruling as a win until illegally terminated employees from all agencies outlined in the court’s rulings are reinstated in their roles, with back pay and their records cleared. As Judge Alsup noted, it is critical that these employees have the false accusation of “poor performance” removed from their records.
The unlawful terminations impact more than NPS rangers who work at national parks. Park rangers are stewards of national monuments and historic sites, including the African Burial Ground, Statute of Liberty, Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the President’s House, Independence Hall and the Portrait Gallery in the Second Bank.
The Portrait Gallery is one of the few places where the story of Moses Williams is in public memory. I have nominated Williams for a Pennsylvania historical marker.
Enslaved by “Artist of the Revolution” Charles Willson Peale, Williams was a master silhouette artist who operated a physiognotrace (face tracing machine) at Peale’s Museum which was located in the building now known as Independence Hall.
A NPS ranger demonstrates the physiognotrace at the Portrait Gallery.
I will submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Interior for records related to the unlawful termination of Independence National Historic Park workers, the President’s House, Independence Hall, and the Portrait Gallery in the Second Bank.
March 16-22, 2025 is Sunshine Week, a time to celebrate transparency, and the public’s right to know what government officials are doing and saying behind closed doors. PHL Watchdog is a Sunshine Week partner.
For more than a year, the City of Philadelphia and SEPTA have fought release of communications with the Philadelphia 76ers related to their now abandoned plan to build an arena atop Jefferson Station. While the Save Chinatown Coalition has given up the fight to obtain records from SEPTA, giving up is not in my DNA. The City and SEPTA eventually will have to give it up and produce the records.
On March 17, the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records will host a panel discussion, Getting to Know Pennsylvania’s Transparency Laws, moderated by Paula Knudsen Burke, senior supervising attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Knudsen Burke represents me on the City’s and SEPTA’s appeals. The event is free and open to the public. Go here to register to attend in person or virtually.
A list of Sunshine Week activities is available here.
On his second day back in the White House, President Trump signed an executive order that rolled back federal civil rights protections claiming discrimination against white men:
Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.
The executive order encouraged “the private sector to end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.”
Before the ink was dry on the executive order, corporations from Amazon to Zoom began to dismantle their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
DeShuna Spencer, creator of kweliTV, launched DEI Watch “to create a space that keeps consumers informed and holds corporations accountable for the promises they’ve made.” DEI Watch will use publicly available data to track companies that have ended or scaled back DEI efforts, as well as companies that continue to actively support and implement DEI initiatives.
In a statement, Spencer said:
DEI isn’t about lowering standards—it’s about leveling the playing field. Qualified Black professionals and other underrepresented groups have long been shut out—not because of a lack of talent, but due to systemic barriers that limit access to opportunities. DEI doesn’t push merit aside for equity; it ensures that talent and hard work—not bias or exclusion—are what truly open doors for all.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – diversity is better for the bottom line. The NAACP stands firm in our belief that, in a global economy, those who reject the multicultural nature of consumerism and business will be left in the past they are living in. That’s why we’re proud to launch the Black Consumer Advisory, reminding our community that in addition to voting on our principles, we have the power to choose where we spend our money. I am confident that this framework will support our community as we make difficult decisions on where to spend our hard-earned money. If corporations want our dollars, they better be ready to do the right thing.
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