On Thursday, January 22, the exhibit “The Dirty Business of Slavery” and related interpretive panels were removed from the President’s House site at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in implementation of Presidential Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Among the signs taken down were tributes to Bishop Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Father Absalom Jones of The Episcopal Church, whose stories have stood at this site as a public witness to Black faith, resilience, and leadership.

We write to express our profound sorrow, righteous anger, and deep alarm at this assault on the history of the United States and on the history of Christianity in this land. This act does not “restore truth” but attempts to sanitize it—precisely targeting those narratives that name slavery, white supremacy, and Black resistance as central to the American story.

As formerly enslaved persons, Bishop Allen and Father Jones organized through the Free African Society in the 1780s to provide economic, spiritual, and social support for other formerly enslaved and free Black people in Philadelphia. They also ministered to the broader city during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793, tending the sick and burying the dead at great personal risk, embodying a Christian witness rooted in liberation, mutual care, and courageous service, even as they endangered their own health and well-being.

In 2016, the United States honored Bishop Richard Allen with a postage stamp recognizing “his inspirational life and profound contribution to American history.” That, a decade later, the federal government would remove his story and that of Father Jones from a public exhibit under the pretense that such content “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” is not only incoherent—it is morally repugnant.

The true insanity is the belief that tearing down signs can alter the truth of this nation’s tortured past or erase the fact that many of the so‑called Founding Fathers held human beings in bondage while proclaiming liberty. Removing these panels does not heal our divisions; it deepens unhealed wounds, obscures the sin of slavery and its ongoing legacies, and delays the honest reckoning that is necessary for repentance, reconciliation, and repair.

We name the pain and outrage these actions cause to the people of Philadelphia and to communities across the country who have looked to this site as a place of truth-telling and lament. We condemn the blatant attempt to repress and erase the real history of the United States—a nation whose lofty ideals of freedom and equality were articulated even as it trafficked in human flesh, yet whose very ideals also inspired Bishop Allen, Father Jones, and their compatriots to struggle for a more just and inclusive democracy. Shortly before his death, Bishop Allen could still declare of this country: “This land, which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free,” a testimony that indicts any effort to make freedom’s story smaller, whiter, or less truthful.

Bishop Allen and Father Jones are inseparable from the faith journeys of their denominations and from the broader story of Christian witness in the United States. No executive order and no act by the National Park Service can erase the churches they founded, the movements they led, the lives they transformed, the souls they nurtured, or the people they helped to free in body and in spirit.

We endorse the federal lawsuit filed by ATAC and the City of Philadelphia to have the exhibit restored, and we call on the National Park Service to immediately restore all removed panels at the President’s House site, including the tributes to Bishop Allen, Father Jones, and the nine Africans enslaved by President George Washington.

Furthermore, we endorse the advocacy of Bishop Samuel L. Green, Sr., and Rev. Carolyn Cavaness, in the State of the Black Community gathering during the First Episcopal District Founders Day Celebration, taking place February 10–12 in Philadelphia.

Bishop Silvester S. Beaman
President, Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church

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Contact:
Tyronda Burgess
African Methodist Episcopal Church
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