By Nate Raymond
June 18 (Reuters) – A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned a judge’s ruling that prevented President Donald Trump’s administration from replacing a slavery exhibit in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
The ruling by the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a judge’s injunction won by the city in February after the National Park Service removed an exhibit describing the ownership of enslaved people by George Washington, the first U.S. president.
The exhibit was removed from the President’s House, as the site at the park is known, after Trump last year signed an executive order targeting what he called a “revisionist movement” that portrayed the United States as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
The Republican president’s order directed the Interior Department to make changes to parks nationwide, leading the National Park Service in January to remove from the historic site an exhibit about nine enslaved people who had lived at Washington’s house.
The Democratic-led city of Philadelphia sued, arguing that the exhibit’s removal breached agreements with the city that gave it a right to be consulted on alterations and matters of importance to the park.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe agreed, granting the injunction. But U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman, writing for a three-judge 3rd Circuit panel, concluded that the exhibit’s removal did not legally constitute an “agency action” subject to court review under the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs agency rules.
Hardiman, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, said the National Park Service has presented plans to install replacement panels that are “full of historical context,” discussing the nine enslaved people while stating Washington often expressed a desire to see slavery abolished.
“They acknowledge the evil of slavery, including its injustices and hypocrisies, and, by telling the story of the nine slaves that Washington kept in the President’s House, remind us of their essential humanity,” Hardiman said.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, issued a brief statement after Thursday’s decision: “Trust in Trump.”
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, a Democrat, in a social media post vowed to “pursue every legal action possible to reverse this decision.”
“We cannot and WILL not rest until the full story of American history – including the existence of Slavery at the President’s House here in Philadelphia – is told, for our Nation and the World to see,” she wrote.
While the 3rd Circuit overturned Rufe’s decision, the original exhibit may still need to be reinstalled under a separate ruling issued on Friday by a different judge in Boston who ordered the restoration of all exhibits removed from national park sites nationwide under Trump’s directive.
That judge, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, shortly after the 3rd Circuit ruled, declined to pause her injunction while the administration appeals.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham and Bill Berkrot)
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