Harriet Tubman began her journey to freedom on Monday, September 17, 1849.
On Monday, September 15, 2025, the Washington Post reported on President Trump’s plan to whitewash the everyday brutality of slavery, including removing the photograph of self-emancipated Gordon (or Peter), who joined the Union army, from a National Park Service site. The photograph of “a typical Negro” was first published in Harper’s Weekly on July 4, 1863.
Abolitionists used the iconic photograph to raise awareness of “how bad slavery was.” I recently viewed an original print of “The Scourged Back” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
According to the Post, interpretive panels at the President’s House have been flagged for removal:
In his executive order, Trump singled out the “corrosive ideology” at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, where the founders signed the Declaration of Independence.
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“This is not just a handful of signs that tell the story of slavery,” said Ed Stierli, senior Mid-Atlantic regional director at the advocacy group National Parks Conservation Association. “This is a place that tells the complete story not just of slavery in America, but what it was like for those who were enslaved by George Washington.”
Trying to extricate slavery from the President’s House exhibit would fundamentally change the nature of the site, said Cindy MacLeod, who was superintendent of Independence National Historical Park for 15 years until 2023.
September is International Underground Railroad Month, a celebration of the history and legacy of the Underground Railroad. Events highlight stories of the self-emancipators who used a covert network of antislavery activists and safe havens to escape bondage.
Frederick Douglass embarked on his journey to freedom on September 3, 1838. Harriet Tubman began her escape on September 17, 1849.
Archival records show that William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad, held meetings at the Johnson House, an Underground Railroad station in Philadelphia. The Johnson House Historic Site is a National Historic Landmark, the highest designation for a historic property.
This International Underground Railroad Month, the Johnson House will host a party with a purpose, Jammin’ in the Garden 2025: A Celebration of Music and Community, on Saturday, September 20, 2025, from 4:00pm to 7:00pm. The fundraiser will support their preservation work and the Center for Social Advocacy.
I have President Trump fatigue. And I’m not alone. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, only 37 percent of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job; 55 percent disapprove.
There are signs of resistance to the chaos and madness. So this Labor Day, the message is in the music.
In my recent opinion piece published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote: “The review of content at the President’s House is an Orwellian descent into censorship. It’s interpretive panels and books today. Will it be National Park Service videos and trading cards tomorrow?
Two days later, President Trump applied new pressure on Smithsonian interpretive texts and exhibitions. The Washington Post reported that White House officials are conducting a comprehensive review of Smithsonian museums:
The White House will launch a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions, collections and operations ahead of America’s 250th-birthday celebrations next year — the first time the Trump administration has detailed steps to scrutinize the institution, which officials say should reflect the president’s call to restore “truth and sanity” to American history.
The vetting process would include reviewing public-facing and online content, curatorial processes and guidelines, exhibition planning and collection use, according to a letter sent to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III on Tuesday and signed by White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan, Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Hale and White House Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought.
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The letter states that the initial review will focus on eight museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
For nearly two centuries, the Smithsonian has served as a globally renowned model of scholarship and public engagement. Smithsonian museums and sites are beloved, trusted destinations for millions of visitors annually looking to gain knowledge, spark curiosity, and find connection. The administration is maligning the expertise and autonomy of an institution that represents the pinnacle of museum and scholarly practice.
This pressure on Smithsonian history museums, in particular, reveals the administration’s ambition to delegitimize the work of the history field and to rob the public of its ability to learn from the past. Sound historical practice depends upon meticulous research of a wide array of sources, open-minded embrace of complexity and ambiguity, and a willingness to update understandings as new information arises. Time and again, Americans have said that they want our country’s full story. Censoring and manipulating content to fit a predetermined, triumphalist narrative is the antithesis of historical practice and a disservice to us all.
Smithsonian exhibitions are grounded in scholarly research. The ahistorical, willfully ignorant Trump wants to impose his interpretation of American history.
Truth is, Trump knows little, if anything, about Black history. He thought Frederick Douglass was still alive in 2017.
While gleaning clues from Project 2025, Trump’s whitewashing of American history is foretold in George Orwell’s 1984:
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
Trump’s Big Lie that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” is straight out of the dictator’s playbook.
In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift wrote: “I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.”
President Trump claims he wants to restore “truth and sanity to American history.” Facing the threat of termination, National Park Service employees may be forced to acquiesce to the insane notion of “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
For the wannabe king, the truth is what he says it is.
In a joint statement, the American Association for State and Local History, Organization of American Historians, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Association of African American Museums, and National Council on Public History, denounced Trump’s diktat to rewrite history:
National Park Service (NPS) sites are being forced to remove historical content that the White House views as “negative about either past or living Americans.” This top-down directive erases people and events that do not fit within a narrow, triumphalist view of history.
What makes this erasure even more alarming is that the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), which runs NPS, is couching its censorship efforts in the very terms that historians and educators often use to explain their own work. Federal officials are eliminating the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and others from history while calling it—to quote a DOI spokesperson—“honest, respectful storytelling” that “honor[s] the complexity of our nation’s shared journey.” In fact, they are doing the opposite. And requiring knowledgeable NPS staff to attribute these alterations to the White House’s interest in “historical accuracy” is doubly deceptive and contrary to the professional standards by which historians conduct their work.
Our country’s 433 NPS sites, which serve millions of visitors per year, are just the starting point for this skewed approach to history, but they will not be the last. Recent pressure on the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, and others show just how far this administration is willing to go to distort the past toward ideological aims in the present. This drive to sanitize and warp history endangers vital sources of public knowledge, from state and local history museums to social studies classrooms to libraries.
The inaugural North Philadelphia History Festival, a celebration of African American and Puerto Rican heritage through art, music, film, history and culture, will be held July 24-27, 2025.
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/
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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.
As the descendant of enslaved people, I mourn the Fourth of July.
However, Independence Hall has a prominent place in Black history.
Independence Hall is the place where the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence; 34 of the 56 signers, including Thomas Jefferson, enslaved Black people.
Independence Hall is the place where the U.S. Constitution, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person and mandated that freedom seekers be returned to bondage, was signed.
Independence Hall is the place where, from 1850 to 1854, hearings were held to return the self-emancipated to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Independence Hall is the place where master silhouette artist Moses Williams worked “every day and evening.”
I have nominated Moses for a Pennsylvania historical marker. If the nomination is approved, the marker will be installed near Independence Hall in 2026.
For updates on Moses Williams’ nomination and walking tour, send your name and email address to phillyjazzapp@gmail.com.
I want to close out Black Music Month with hometown hero Stanley Clarke. Born in Philadelphia on June 30, 1951, Clarke is a groundbreaking acoustic and electric bassist known for revolutionizing the role of the bass in contemporary music. His virtuosic technique, whether on acoustic upright or electric bass, helped elevate the instrument from its traditional supporting role to a dynamic lead instrument.
To celebrate Black Music Month, I will give a gallery talk highlighting some of the items in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s exhibit, “Message In Our Music.” The items span the 1770s to the 1970s.
It was illegal for the enslaved to learn how to read or write. Stories and cultural practices were passed down from generation to generation in the music. In the prelude to gospel legend Bobby Jones’ “Just A Closer Walk with Thee,” Maya Angelou said, “They sung us all the way out of slavery.”
Music was the first draft of Black history.
One of the items in the exhibit is a collection of spirituals sung before the Civil War, including Free At Las’, compiled by Edward Avery McIlhenny whose family enslaved hundreds of Black people.
“Free at last” has resonated with African Americans for hundreds of years. The significance of the phrase was lost on Kroger. The supermarket chain came under fire for selling Juneteenth cakes decorated with AI slop.
TikToker Blaq Monalisa posted images of the cakes saying:
Y’all decorate everything else around here cute, everything else around here cute. But for Juneteenth, you wanna just throw something on a freaking cookie cake and expect someone to buy it.
The video went viral. After the backlash, Kroger said the “products have been removed” from the store.
The phrase “free at last” is known for being a prominent part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, borrowed from the title of a Negro-Spiritual song. And now the phrase, which represents a hard-fought struggle, is being featured on a supermarket cake, casually scribbled in internet shorthand.
As you will see in the “Message In Our Music” exhibit, the phrase predates Julia Perry’s 1951 composition.
My gallery talk is free and open to the public. To register, please go here.
UPDATE: Check out 6abc Action News’ report about the exhibition.
All That Philly Jazz 