A University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School clinic filed a brief supporting a preliminary injunction that would halt the removal of a slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site in Independence National Historical Park.
Filed in April alongside the Legal Defense Fund, the brief was submitted on behalf of two Pennsylvania organizations: the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and African American walking tour company The Black Journey. The exhibit’s removal — affecting a memorial dedicated to nine people enslaved by George Washington — began in January under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
A federal district court paused the dismantling in February by granting a preliminary injunction. The brief argued that the National Park Service and Department of Interior’s removal of the exhibit was “potentially motivated by a discriminatory purpose.”
LDF assistant counsel Avatara Smith-Carrington told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the “hope” of the amicus brief was to “make clear for the Third Circuit all that’s at stake in terms of the removal of these important pieces of our shared history.”
Smith-Carrington added that the brief examined the impact of the exhibit’s removal as well as the broader implications of “what it means to actually deny people the ability to interact with information about the truth about our nation’s founding.”
The brief also described the exhibit’s removal as an “arbitrary and capricious” violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which “stipulates the ways in which federal agencies may make and enforce regulations.”
According to Smith-Carrington, the measure was intended to show how the National Park Service’s actions following the executive order “quickly moved to begin to target and identify” sites that focused on the “contributions of Black people to this country.”
“It is kind of concerning that we would see an agency move so quickly to remove these important parts from our shared history without thought to the impact that it would have on the public,” they added.
Read more from Moukthikadevi Kanakala’s reporting at the Daily Pennsylvanian.
