Efforts to preserve history after slavery exhibit reinstalled at President’s House

New legislation is set to be introduced to protect American history from censorship. This follows a court order that required the Trump administration to restore an exhibit on slavery at the President’s House in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood.

The restored exhibit was originally removed last month at Independence Hall on 6th and Market streets. NBC10 crews were on the scene on Jan. 22 and found that the plaques had been taken down.

According to the city’s visitor center, the exhibit shows the names of nine slaves who worked for George Washington, America’s first president. The exhibit was housed on the same land where the homes of Presidents Washington and Adams once stood.

The removal came after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March of 2025 that read in part, “take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties within the Department’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

Hundreds of historians and community members had gathered to protest the removal of the exhibit, while the City of Philadelphia had sued to have the panels returned.

A “Restore the Truth” rally at the President’s House at Independence Mall called for the restoration of a slavery exhibit that the Trump administration removed from the site last month. 

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, as well as Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties, had even joined Philadelphia’s lawsuit.

Then, earlier this month,  U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe set the deadline for Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, at 5 p.m. to have the exhibit at the President’s House fully restored and reinstalled after she issued a scathing ruling likening the removal of the original displays to the governmental oppression discussed in George Orwell’s novel “1984.”

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984’ now existed, with its motto, ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote in her ruling. “It does not.”

By the evening of Friday. Feb. 20, the exhibit was restored.

Workers with the National Park Service worked on restoring more of the slavery exhibit on Friday. NBC10’s Aaron Baskerville reports.