There’s no disputing the record: George Washington, the leader of the Continental Army and the first president of the United States, legally (and immorally) claimed other human beings as his personal property. While you may find people who claim Washington was ambivalent about chattel slavery — or felt hypocritical given the nation’s founding principles — no one can truthfully argue that Washington didn’t wrongly exercise godlike control over those African human beings.
And there ought not be people who’d argue against the U.S. government posthumously honoring the humanity and dignity of such people in ways that Washington did not.
There ought not be people who’d argue against the U.S. government posthumously honoring the humanity and dignity of such people in ways that Washington did not.
But last week, the Trump administration had employees of the National Park Service take crowbars to the President’s House in Philadelphia and pry off its walls exhibits that provided the names and biographies of nine people President Washington brought to that house and held in captivity.
Those exhibits weren’t removed because they were false. They weren’t removed because they contained inaccuracies. They weren’t removed because they honored people whose recognition isn’t warranted. They were removed because, as we approach the country’s 250th birthday, they clash with the sanitized white-hat version of American history the Trump administration wants to sell.
The Philadelphia exhibit helped show that Washington wasn’t just a slave owner, but a conniving one. When he was president, Pennsylvania had a law that allowed any enslaved person brought there to be set free after six months, but historian John Garrison Marks told E&E News that every six months, Washington would send his captives out of Pennsylvania, if only temporarily, to avoid setting them free. Marks has a book due in April called, “Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.”
Trump isn’t fighting for American memory, though. He’s fighting for erasure.
As we’ve already seen from his threats against the Smithsonian and heard from his Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the Trump administration is insisting upon a “patriotic education.” The executive order Trump signed a year ago called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” says that “‘Patriotic education’ means a presentation of the history of America grounded in: an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.” But it is neither accurate, nor honest, nor unifying to remove from the public a display of the people Washington.
Who even knows what it means to be ennobled by a characterization of American history — but if it takes lying about history for people to be inspired, then they need to look elsewhere for inspiration. There’s certainly nothing inspiring about an administration that tries to make the country see its founders, including Washington, as inherently beyond reproach.
If it takes lying about history for people to be inspired, then they need to look elsewhere for inspiration.
While Trump’s attempts to edit history may appear unrelated to the near-daily outrages we’re seeing from masked federal immigration agents, there’s a mean-spirited and mendacious spirit that drives both projects. Both are intended to show us who matters in America and who doesn’t. Washington? Yes. The human beings he had complete and total control over? No.
And who matters in the present moment? People who were born here and support Trump? Yes. Everybody else? Not so much.
There’s another connecting thread between Trump’s attack on history and his immigration agents’ attacks on people in the street. The more you can convince Americans that everything related to this country’s founding was essentially perfect, the easier it is to convince them that America is perfect — and that anybody who would take to the streets to say otherwise must be wrong. The Trump administration ordering the removal of the exhibits at the President’s House ought to be seen as the latest blowback to Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which argues that the spirit of 1619 animates the United States more than the spirit of 1776 does. The Declaration of Independence is what the United States wants to be, “1619” argues, but slavery and its legacy better reflect what the country is. It’s fine to argue with Hannah-Jones’ interpretation of history; plenty historians have. And during his first term, Trump responded to the “1619 Project” with his own “1776 Commission,” but nothing about that response or last week’s removal of the exhibits can change the fact that, in 1776, the person leading the colonies’ fight for political freedom denied physical freedom to others. One of the people named in the Philadelphia exhibit, Ona Judge (or Oney Judge) ran away from the President’s House in 1796, and according to Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book “Never Caught,” Washington spent the remaining three years of his life attempting to re-enslave her. She still legally belonged to Washinton’s heirs, and, thus, when she died in 1848, she died a fugitive. If learning that story sours somebody on the first president, so be it. There’s no law (at least not yet) that says Americans are required to love George Washington. What we ought to love is the truth, and we ought to call out every attempt from the government to keep us from knowing it.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
