President Trump – Page 2

The President’s House

The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, an open-air installation, was dedicated on December 15, 2010. The National Park Service site pays homage to the nine enslaved people in the household of President George Washington – Austin, Christopher Sheels, Giles, Hercules, Joe, Moll, Oney Judge, Paris and Richmond.

The President’s House at Independence National Historical Park was born out of protest.

In a sign of the times, the President’s House is in the crosshairs of President Trump who wants to sugarcoat and whitewash American history. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports the site has been flagged for content review:

The President’s House Site, where Presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived, came under particular scrutiny with six exhibits flagged for review. The exhibit focuses on the contradictory coexistence of liberty and slavery during the founding of America and memorializes the people Washington enslaved.

For instance, park staff commented on a display titled “Life Under Slavery,” flagging that it “speaks of whipping, depriving of food, clothing, and shelter; as well as beating, torturing, and raping those they enslaved.”

[…]

Thirteen specific items spread across six exhibits at the site were identified for review.

This includes components of displays titled: “Life Under Slavery,” “History Lost & Found,” “The Executive Branch,” “The Dirty Business of Slavery,” “The House and the People Who Worked & Lived In It,” and an illustration with the words “An Act respecting fugitives from Justice,” in reference to Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act, according to an internal form, reviewed by The Inquirer, where employees were directed to submit their reviews.

In 2002, the NPS had planned to ignore the full and accurate history of the site. The Liberty Bell Center, then-under construction, is in the footprint of President Washington’s slave quarters (circled).

Attorney Michael Coard, a founder of Avenging The Ancestors Coalition, was a member of the President’s House Project Oversight Committee which oversaw development and construction of the site. Coard led the charge to tell the full story.

We will resist any attempt to erase the complicated history of this memory site.

As we protest to preserve the physical structure and interpretive panels, we also will use digital technologies and 3D modeling to reconstruct the President’s House and outbuildings without constraint or compromise.

The President’s House.ai will be accessible to visitors on any device or browser anywhere in the world.

We will create AI-generated avatars of the nine African descendants enslaved by President Washington, including Ona Judge (1773-1848) and Hercules Posey (1748-1812).

Visitors to the President’s House.ai will be able to hold real-time conversations with the AI ancestors. The avatars’ training will be grounded in trusted primary and secondary sources.

AI Ona will spill the tea on how she escaped from bondage.

President Washington placed an advertisement in the May 24, 1796 edition of The Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser offering a $10 reward (roughly $365 today) for the capture of Oney Judge.

As activists, historians, architects and technologists resist President Trump’s efforts to censor uncomfortable truths, the witless president unwittingly triggered the Streisand Effect.

Freedom School for Web Archiving

In the summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. In addition to voter education, COFO organized 41 Freedom Schools where Black children were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as Black history and culture.

In the winter of 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to whitewash American history. Federal agencies are deleting webpages.

In a memorandum, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Sean Parnell wrote:

By March 5, 2025, Components must take all practicable steps, consistent with records management requirements, to remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). All articles, photos, and videos removed from DoD websites and social media platforms must be archived and retained in accordance with applicable records management policies/

[…]

Social Media Content: Components must remove and follow records management requirements for DEI content removed from all official DoD social media accounts. If Components cannot remove DEI content from DoD social media accounts by March 5, 2025, they must temporarily remove from public display all news articles, photos and videos published between January 20, 2021, and January 19, 2025, until the content is fully reviewed and DEI content removed. While DBI-related content outside of this date range must also be removed, articles, photos, and videos from the last four years are the immediate priority to align DoD communication with the current Administration.

Federal agencies plan to decommission hundreds of websites. We must be intentional and fight the erasure of webpages related to Black history and culture.

Inspired by the freedom schools of the Civil Rights Movement, Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) has organized the Freedom School for Web Archiving, a series of webinars that will train “new generations of memory workers to preserve and steward online content that reflects the Black experience… Participants will gain foundational skills in web archiving—whether for personal, community, or institutional use—and explore how this work resists erasure, disinformation, and historical revisionism.”

The Freedom School for Web Archiving is free and open to the public. To register for a webinar, go here.

Memorial Day 2025

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.

Black History Under Attack

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.

To register for the DC gathering, go here.

Trump Wants to Whitewash History

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.

Writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin testified in support of legislation to establish the National Commission on Negro History and Culture.

Baldwin observed:

[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 more than 60 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence enslaved Black people.

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.

Resisting DOGE at National Park Service

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 has been closed due to a staff shortage since 2024. NPS terminations include two employees at Independence National Historic Park.

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.

Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work

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.

Harkening back to the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” movement during the Great Depression, the NAACP has launched the Black Consumer Advisory. NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson said:

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.

To sign the Black Consumer Pledge, go here.