The Trump administration’s claim that it has the power to rewrite American history along its preferred ideological lines was tested in federal court on Friday, as a judge considered whether to order the National Park Service to reinstall displays commemorating nine enslaved African people who worked at George Washington’s home in Philadelphia.
During a daylong hearing, Judge Cynthia M. Rufe of Federal District Court expressed deep skepticism that the administration has the power to unilaterally make changes at the historic house, where Washington lived while leading the fledging U.S. government during his presidency.
Judge Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, appeared to reject the government’s claim that reasonable minds could disagree about whether the site should acknowledge Washington’s ownership of slaves. From the bench, she read aloud from a tweet by President Trump during his first term bemoaning the removal of monuments to Confederate generals. “Can’t change history, but you can learn from it,” he wrote then.
The judge suggested that earlier approach was difficult to reconcile with Mr. Trump’s second-term executive order that led to the changes at the President’s House site. The executive order called for the Park Service to take down or cover up any materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
The idea that the site “changes on the whim of someone in charge” is “horrifying to listen to,” Judge Rufe said. “I’m sorry, that’s not what we elected anybody for.”
The City of Philadelphia sued last week over the administration’s removal of videos and explanatory panels about slavery from the President’s House. Lawyers for the city asked Judge Rufe to issue a preliminary order that would restore the site to its previous condition while the case is pending. On Friday, she said she would arrange to inspect the panels in storage on Monday. Judge Rufe also asked the government to promise there would be no further changes to the site. She said that if the government did not make such a promise, she would quickly issue an order.
The case has special significance as the Trump administration aggressively revises official symbols and signage around the country. It comes as Independence National Historical Park, which includes the President’s House and the Liberty Bell Center, prepares to take the spotlight this summer when America celebrates its 250th birthday.
Gregory in den Berken, a Justice Department lawyer, argued that as the site’s legal owner, the Park Service had the authority to revise the story that it tells, part of the executive branch’s “inherent statutory authority and discretion.”
Judge Rufe called that assertion of executive power “cavalier,” adding that “it’s frightening to think that could happen to Independence Hall tomorrow.”
Mr. in den Berken also argued there was no need for the court to act immediately because there was no emergency. The disputed panels are safely in storage nearby, at the National Constitution Center, he said. “There is no immediate urgency,” he said. “There is no irreparable harm.”
But internal Park Service documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that more changes to America’s birthplace are in the works. The documents show that the Trump administration has ordered the Park Service to remove or revise other signs about slavery at Independence National Historical Park.
At the Liberty Bell Center, the administration wants to take down or cover up a sign about “the contradiction between the ideals of the Revolution and the reality of more than four million enslaved people,” as well as a sign that acknowledges the systematic deprivation of civil rights from Black people after the Civil War.
And at Independence Hall, Trump officials have asked the Park Service to revise text presented on an iPad that highlights the irony of keeping enslaved people in an office directly above the room where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Representatives for the Park Service and its parent agency, the Interior Department, did not respond to a request for comment on the documents.
Across the country, Park Service workers have started removing signs, films and other materials in connection with Mr. Trump’s executive order to remove or rewrite content that may “disparage Americans” or promote “corrosive ideology.”
At Friday’s hearing, lawyers for the City of Philadelphia argued that the site was governed by a series of cooperative agreements from as early as 1950 that stipulated that interpretive content would be developed jointly by the city and federal governments. One section gives the Park Service “all responsibility” to manage, interpret and maintain the President’s House after taking ownership.
“Seventy years of collaboration went out the window,” said Renee Garcia, the city solicitor.
Current and former city officials took the stand to describe a yearslong collaborative process between the city and the federal government, prompted by a historian’s 2002 revelations about the enslaved people’s living conditions. The Africans held in slavery by Washington “are as important as understanding the founders who were there,” said Valerie V. Gay, the city’s chief cultural officer. “The people who created the words that we live by were fallible human beings,” she added.
The city expects as many as 1.5 million visitors this summer for the United States’ semiquincentennial, Ms. Gay said.
Among the formerly enslaved people whose stories were told in the displays that have now been removed were Ona Judge and Hercules Posey. In his will, Washington said that the 123 people who he claimed were his property should be set free upon his wife’s death. But Ms. Judge, who served as Martha Washington’s maid, slipped away from the President’s House in 1796 and boarded a ship bound for New Hampshire. Mr. Posey, who cooked America’s first state dinners, fled after Washington took him back to his Virginia estate at Mount Vernon.
On Friday, Judge Rufe compared removing the stories of Ms. Judge and Mr. Posey from the site to removing a monument to U.S. soldiers who liberated a Nazi death camp.
“What if they just decided to tear down that monument like it didn’t happen?” she said. “You can’t erase history once you’ve learned it. It doesn’t work that way.”
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
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