2026-02-22 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Russian air strikes knocked out Ukrainian power plants earlier this winter, much of the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv went dark, and indoor temperatures plummeted. Just 60 kilometers from the front, Tornado rockets, cruise and ballistic missiles, and attack drones have been raining down on the city of 450,000 for the last four years. Now, during the coldest winter in more than a decade, most of Mykolaiv’s citizens are once again enduring bitterly cold homes and, when electric water pumps fail, dry taps.
“Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational.”
But there are new glimmers of hope in Mykolaiv. Last November, 26 newly installed photovoltaic roof panels, paired with 100 kilowatt-hours of lithium battery storage, began to power heat pumps and generators to keep the city’s Urban Rehabilitation Center for Children and Persons with Disabilities up and running. Thanks to the Danish Refugee Council and Denmark’s foreign ministry, the project’s donors, the center continued operating even during a 32-hour stretch of shelling in mid-December. In addition to treating 70 patients a day, the center has opened its doors to at-risk Mykolaivians who lack heat. Several other institutions in Mykolaiv have also jettisoned their exclusive reliance on the national grid, which is mostly powered by large natural gas, coal-fired, and nuclear plants, and now draw energy from small-scale distributed systems that produce electricity at or near the point of use.
Since the war’s onset, Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure—its old-school fossil-fueled power plants, substations, and transmission lines—in an effort to advance its offensive and beat down the Ukrainian people. Before this winter even set in, half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure lay in ruins. Economists estimate that total damage to the nation’s energy sector now exceeds $56 billion.
This winter is the most devastating yet: Attacks have left giant swaths of the country with irregular electricity and heat as temperatures have plummeted to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The bitter conditions have left many schools and other public services closed since Christmas. In Kyiv, as well as in Kharkiv, Poltava, and Dnipro, more than 1,000 public heating tents, powered by diesel generators and wood-burning stoves, offer residents warmth and a place to charge their phones. But these improvisations aren’t enough. On January 14, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared a state of emergency in the energy sector.
While Ukraine’s energy system, which had a pre-war generation capacity of 60 gigawatts, scrambles to keep the lights on, grid operators are also looking past the next drone swarm, pushing to diversify the country’s energy sources, says Lars Handrich, a German energy expert who works closely with Ukraine. The plan is to replace the bulky thermal plants and centralized grid, which are vulnerable to drone and other attacks, with distributed renewables and modestly sized gas-fired plants that make less attractive targets for incoming fire. According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025—enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes—and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.
Ukraine is revamping its power sector as rapidly as it can, not for climate protection but for energy security. “Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”
Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.
Ukraine’s shift away from fossil fuels began before Russia’s full-scale invasion: To join the European Union, the nation must adopt the bloc’s climate criteria, and in 2021, Ukraine pledged to be coal-free by 2035. The war interrupted this phaseout, but it also accelerated Ukraine’s adoption of renewables, despite its strapped budget.
European countries are bankrolling most of Ukraine’s energy makeover, including all of the Mykolaiv solar installations. West of Kyiv, the city of Zhytomyr plans to run entirely on renewables by 2050 with the help of the Rebuild Ukraine initiative, which is largely European-funded. And in the Kyiv region and beyond, solar systems supported by the Solar Supports Ukraine program are keeping schools open during blackouts. A self-financed exception: Before the war began, the Sunny City cooperative in Slavutych, a town near the Belarus border, crowdfunded to create a solar power plant on the roofs of three municipal buildings.
According to the International Energy Agency, Ukraine made “strong strides” in rebuilding and bolstering its system’s resilience this past summer. The renewables rollout was—and still is—dominated by rooftop solar, small photovoltaic arrays, wind, local storage, and biomass combustion.
Some self-sustaining energy zones combine renewables with conventional energy. The central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, for example, boasts five microgridst that combine local generation, including solar, gas, and hydroelectric power, with energy storage systems. Five major wind farms will join the energy mix in the next two years. In Khmelnytskyi, the national university’s 4,400-kilowatt microgrid includes a natural gas-fired cogeneration unit (it produces both electricity and heat), a 264-kilowatt solar array, a diesel-powered plant, and a gas-fired boiler house, which generates heat.
Before Russia seized territory that hosted more than half of Ukraine’s wind power capacity in 2014 and 2022, including major wind farms on the Sea of Azov coast, Ukraine had 34 wind parks, comprised of nearly 700 turbines. Since wind generation is so central to its decentralized energy strategy, Ukraine has sought to increase wind generation even in the midst of Russian attacks.
Just 65 miles from the front, DTEK is installing the 500-megawatt Tyligulska Wind Power Plant, the first wind park ever built in a war zone. It is a crucial source of electricity in southern Ukraine and will supply 900,000 households when it’s finished. The country currently has 7 gigawatts of wind power in the pipeline that could be installed this year, according to Andriy Konechenkov, of the Ukrainian Wind Energy Association, should conditions on the ground allow it. The new turbines would more than triple the country’s current wind-power capacity.
While the war has sidelined the rollout of utility-scale wind farms, solar installations atop households, businesses, and public institutions have continued at an unprecedented rate. Ukraine’s YASNO utility, which supplies electricity and gas to millions of Ukrainians, says its customers are snapping up the solar and storage packages that it offers. On sunny days, Ukraine even boasts energy surpluses.
The German-Ukrainian Energy Partnership, a platform for intergovernmental dialogue on energy matters, estimates that Ukraine’s long-term technical solar potential exceeds 80 gigawatts, on par with the output of 80 medium-sized nuclear reactors. “The sector is emerging as one of the fastest-developing renewable markets in Eastern Europe,” according to its website. A University of Technology Sydney study suggests Ukraine could meet 91 percent of its energy needs from a combination of solar and onshore wind using 1 percent of its land.
“Individual consumers want to get off the grid any way that they can,” explains Andriy Martynyuk of Ecoclub, a Ukraine-based NGO that helps communities develop renewables. “It’s largely a grassroots phenomenon and a bit chaotic now,” he says. But Martynyuk expects the demand for renewables will further surge when state subsidies for fossil energy, which have priced Ukrainian energy significantly below market rates, are eventually phased out.
This boom, of course, begs for storage options, and there, too, Ukraine has moved quickly. In 2024 and 2025, the country’s national grid operator invested in half a gigawatt of storage capacity—an impressive amount according to experts, who note that it is just under a quarter of Germany’s total storage supply. The battery projects that in Europe take two years to roll out, the Financial Times reports, take just six months in Ukraine.
In terms of a new, cutting-edge distributed energy system, Ukraine may be racing forward with the zeal of a new convert, but even the planned rollout of renewables in 2026 won’t keep most of the Ukrainian population safe from Russia’s depredations next winter. Wartime Ukraine has the will but not the financial resources to revamp its energy production on its own. The nation’s largest donor, the E.U., is already contributing nearly $200 billion to Ukraine’s budget for military expenditures and humanitarian aid, including energy. The speed with which Ukraine blankets its territory with distributed energy systems could make the difference between surviving another punishing winter—or succumbing to its cruelty.
2026-02-22 05:58:14
There have been nearly 1,000 confirmed measles cases in the US in 2026 so far, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than four times the amount of cases as this time last year.
It’s unclear how much larger the spread could be, as the CDC’s number refers to reported and confirmed cases.
Many of the current cases stem from an outbreak in South Carolina, with the state nearly reporting around 800 cases since January. Twenty-six states have reported cases this year, spanning the entire country—from California to Maine and from Texas to Wisconsin.
During 2025, there were 2,281 confirmed cases of measles. The country is now at risk of, if not on track to, losing its measles elimination status that it’s held since 2000. Two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, usually administered in children, provides 97 percent protection, though distrust of vaccinations, fueled by mis- and disinformation, has risen in the past few years.
The surging 2026 numbers come after more than a year of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. serving as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He, along with key allies, has led the agency toward an unprecedented reshaping of the nation’s vaccination system for children—a mission he began prior to becoming secretary.
There are no current death reports from 2026, though at least three people died from measles in 2025. As more Americans are at risk of becoming sick from the illness, Kennedy has continued to spread false information about alternative remedies like cod liver oil.
Despite the record numbers and quick spread in 2025, HHS told Mother Jones back in December that they weren’t especially worried about the brewing South Carolina outbreak. The CDC was “not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard wrote.
To date, that outbreak has led to at least 20 hospitalizations. Though, according to reporting from ProPublica, that number is likely much higher as hospitals in South Carolina aren’t required to report when they admit patients with measles-related illnesses.
Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician in South Carolina who is board certified in pediatric infectious disease, told ProPublica that she didn’t even know that anyone had been hospitalized due to the illness in her state until she saw it on social media.
“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”
Even if reports of measles were required, the chaos the Trump administration has rained down on the federal workforce could make it hard to understand and address the scope of the issue.
In October, more than 1,000 CDC employees were laid off, only for some 700 to be rehired the next day. As Americans face another widespread public health crisis, the pinned post on Kennedy’s X account isn’t about how to protect yourself or your children from measles. Instead, it’s a video of himself working out in a sauna, shirtless, with Kid Rock.
2026-02-22 03:12:21
President Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice right now is the appointee who refused to restrict the president’s tariff agenda.
After the high court ruled against him in his tariff case on Friday, Trump has repeatedly singled out Justice Brett Kavanaugh in praise—the only one of Trump’s three appointments to dissent against the majority opinion that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, does not give Trump authority to impose tariffs.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed in 2017 and 2020 respectively, sided with Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices in the majority opinion.
“I would like to thank Justice Kavanaugh for his, frankly, his genius and his great ability. Very proud of that appointment,” Trump said during the press conference following the Friday ruling. During that address, Trump claimed, without providing details, that the loss in the Supreme Court “made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear rather than less.”
Trump initially announced that he would impose a global tariff of 10 percent, invoking a law never before utilized by a president which allows the executive to “impose an across-the-board tariff for 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend it,” according to the New York Times. On Saturday, per a Truth Social post, Trump raised the amount to 15 percent—the cap for this kind of tariff imposition.
It’s unclear how this global tariff will impact trade negotiations with world leaders. It’s also unclear, and not covered in the ruling, if the executive office will be refunding any retailers impacted by the previous tariffs. Estimates place the total amount that Trump has collected under IEEPA between $133 billion and $175 billion.
Amid Trump’s strong rebukes of the justices who opted to deny the overarching presidential authority, he continued to lavish praise on Kavanaugh, who, according to a recent Marquette Law School poll, has the lowest net favorability among all of his peers.
“I’m so proud of him,” Trump said of Kavanaugh on Friday, repeatedly citing his dissent.
“My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning, before mentioning the other two men who sided with him: “and, of course, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.” Despite dissenting from his liberal colleagues in the recent tariff case, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to side with liberals in outcomes, according to an analysis by SCOTUSblog.
Trump has long championed Kavanaugh, providing strong support for the appointee during his controversial approval process in 2018. When Christine Blasey Ford had accused then-nominee Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school, Trump called for his followers to pray for him and his family. After Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the alleged assault, which she reportedly detailed to her husband and therapist several years prior, Trump wrote that Kavanaugh “is a fine man and great intellect.”
Around a year later, in 2019, the Times published another sexual misconduct allegation against him, spurring calls for his impeachment. Kavanaugh denied both of the women’s accounts.
Trump again came to the rescue: “Can’t let Brett Kavanaugh give Radical Left Democrat (Liberal Plus) Opinions based on threats of Impeaching him over made up stories (sound familiar?), false allegations, and lies. This is the game they play. Fake and Corrupt News is working overtime!,” Trump wrote at the time, adding the hashtag “#ProtectKavanaugh.”
2026-02-21 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When it comes to adapting to the consequences of climate change, the federal government has relied heavily on one flagship program: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. Administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), BRIC has doled out $4.5 billion in grants to help states and cities prepare for future disasters. Wildfire retrofits in Washington State, safe rooms in Oklahoma, and sewer systems in Detroit have all benefitted from the program.
Despite bipartisan support for the effort, the Trump Administration issued a memo announcing its intent to shut down BRIC in April. Then, in December, a federal judge ordered FEMA to restore the program’s funding and “promptly take all steps necessary to reverse” the termination. The agency had two months to appeal.
Though that deadline passed last week, the Trump administration is still holding out. Two FEMA officials told Grist that the agency has taken no apparent steps to revive BRIC in compliance with the December court order. As a result, state and local governments across the country are holding critical projects in limbo as they await a resolution.
“It boggles the mind that almost two dozen states had to go back to court to ask Judge Stearns to enforce the existing court order.”
The officials who spoke to Grist requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from agency leadership. Separately, a FEMA spokesperson said the agency complies with court orders, but did not respond to questions about the future of BRIC.
FEMA’s deadline to appeal the judge’s ruling was February 9. On Tuesday, a coalition of state attorneys general accused the Trump administration of dragging its feet on compliance. (Those attorneys represent the states behind the original lawsuit over BRIC, which resulted in the December ruling.)
“Over two months have passed and Defendants have offered no indication to Plaintiff States, the public, FEMA’s regional offices, or apparently even Defendants’ own attorney that they have complied with the Order,” attorneys for almost two dozen states wrote in a court filing on Tuesday. The states asked the judge to compel FEMA to follow the order and make BRIC funding available.
BRIC actually launched during the first Trump administration, but most of its funding came from the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That money endowed more than 2,000 projects nationwide. At the time of the April memo shuttering the program, FEMA told Grist that BRIC “was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.” (The acting FEMA director who issued that memo, Cameron Hamilton, lost his job a few weeks later after telling Congress that he didn’t think Trump should abolish his agency.)
The BRIC pause is one part of an overall freeze on FEMA’s disaster mitigation spending. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, has placed it under a de facto spending moratorium, requiring Secretary Kristi Noem’s sign-off for any expenses over $100,000. FEMA has not approved any new disaster mitigation projects, has refused to process paperwork for projects that were already in progress, and has been slow even to reimburse communities for the cost of disaster recovery, a core activity mandated by Congress.
When a group of around two dozen states sued to stop the cancellation of the program in a Massachusetts federal court, FEMA claimed that it was not canceling BRIC. Instead, it said in a court filing that it “ha[d] not ended” the program and “continue[d] to evaluate whether to end the…program or to revise it,” even as it acknowledged it had not made new funding available.
The judge rejected that argument and issued an injunction preventing the agency from stopping the program. Judge Richard Stearns, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote in an order that the law “entitle[s] the States to a certain measure of funding for mitigation projects each fiscal year.”
The state attorneys general allege that FEMA has not provided states, grantees, or regional offices with any new information about the future of the program—nor has it made two years of suspended BRIC funding available to states. The plaintiff states said in Tuesday’s court filing that a senior agency official had told them FEMA is “still in the process of connecting with leadership about how BRIC will operate and on what timelines.”
“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience.”
Two agency employees who work on disaster adaptation confirmed the states’ allegation that FEMA has not yet restored the program. The decision on how to proceed appears to rest with senior Homeland Security officials, they added.
“I haven’t heard a word internally, at all,” one of the officials told Grist.
The December court order found that the states could suffer irreparable harm if BRIC projects that were already underway lost funding or collapsed due to an abrupt shutdown. The state attorneys general are now arguing that FEMA’s recent delays further threaten those projects. Attorneys for the states said that FEMA has refused to provide updates on the status of frozen projects, even when state officials have warned that projects are in jeopardy. The states submitted more than a dozen affidavits showing that FEMA has declined to provide updates for stalled projects, including a seismic retrofit for a rural California hospital and a pair of public school safe rooms in Wisconsin.
The Massachusetts cities of Chelsea and Everett, just outside of Boston, were relying on around $50 million in BRIC money to fund an ambitious flood protection project. The cities were going to build a flood barrier and storm surge control project that would prevent tidal flooding in a floodplain that contains a high school, a rail line, and a regional produce distribution center. The barrier would have doubled as an expansion of a park that will be submerged by high tides in the coming years.
But FEMA paused the project’s funding last spring, after the April memo. Since then, the effort has been in limbo. The pause has meant that the two cities lost out on $50 million in matching money from a state fund. After a year in stasis, local officials are weighing whether to split the project into separate stages, pursuing the storm surge system alone while punting on the other parts.
“We could just put it on a shelf and wait for federal funding, or we could attempt to break the project into phases,” said Emily Granoff, who leads the project and is the deputy director of housing and community development for the city of Chelsea. “This project needs to happen,” she added, “but we don’t have the information we need.”
Disaster experts said the delay amounts to dereliction of duty. “It boggles the mind that almost two dozen states had to go back to court to ask Judge Stearns to enforce the existing court order against FEMA,” said Shana Udvardy, a senior policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization. “What we’ve seen when it comes to this BRIC case [and others] is this Trump administration’s willingness to either outright ignore the law or suggest it has a plan in place to implement the law, an obvious delay tactic to get away with doing nothing.”
President Trump and Secretary Noem have said they want the federal government to play a smaller role in disaster recovery, but experts told Grist that destroying BRIC will jeopardize that goal. That’s because BRIC projects ultimately reduce disaster recovery costs by funding more resilient infrastructure before it’s needed.
“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience,” said Leo Martinez-Diaz, the director of the climate and sustainability program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s the only thing that ultimately reduces the losses.”
2026-02-21 16:01:00
One of the unmistakable throughlines of the second Trump administration is how it’s overhauling policies that directly affect African Americans, most notably by targeting programs and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
For journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s an attempt to take the country back to an era before the civil rights movement. “A lot of folks are saying, you know, that this administration is rolling back the ’60s, but I’m like, he—this administration’s actually going back further than that.”
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.The administration is also removing references to Black history from the nation’s museums, parks, and schools. When history itself is being erased at the highest levels, who’s left to tell us where we’ve been and where we’re headed?
This week on Reveal, as part of Black History Month, we’re bringing you conversations from our sister podcast, More To The Story, with three prominent Black writers who are fighting to tell a more inclusive American story.
2026-02-21 07:05:26
On Thursday just before noon, bundled up couples and small groups of people wandered through the President’s House on Independence Hall, some snapping photos and others inquiring what was happening as four National Park employees worked in tandem, behind a barricade, to reattach panel after panel of the President’s House slavery exhibits. They worked in the cold, lifting the massive glass squares up onto the brick wall and then screwing them into place. Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle L. Parker approached, admiring the exhibit for a moment before shaking hands with the workers and thanking them.
“I want you to know I’m grateful,” Parker said. “It’s our honor,” one of the employees responded.
They continued to work until at least 16 panels of the memorial were reinstalled. The exhibits had been removed on a Thursday afternoon nearly a month before, in accordance with Trump’s 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order to rid “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties” of content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But after the city sued, US District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued an injunction ordering the government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.” That order was overruled on Friday, just one hour before the deadline Rufe had set for the exhibit’s reinstallation. Now, the National Park Service must maintain the status quo—leaving 16 of 34 panels up—while the federal government appeals the initial injunction.
For a community that fought to restore history, the initial order to restore the President’s House exhibit had been cause for celebration. “We need to understand what we’ve done here. This is actually a moment in time; your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are going to be talking about this for years and decades to come,” said Michael Coard, attorney and founding member of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a broad-based Black-led coalition of activists, on Thursday as the the National Park Service initially started to restore panels. “This here, right now, what we’ve done is people power.” As Coard spoke, he stood in front of a wall engraved with the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington. At the bottom of his podium rested the 1863 image “Scourged Back,” which was marked for removal from Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park last year.
ATAC had been an instrumental part of establishing the exhibit in 2010 and had filed an amicus brief in support of the city’s lawsuit on January 27.
The exhibit in Center City was one of a dozen other signs and materials from national parks removed after Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post reported that park staff interpreted the order as including “any references to historic racism, sexism, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.” As America approaches its 250th anniversary this year, these removals foreshadow a celebration that, on the national level, excludes underrepresented communities’ contributions to American history, refuses to reckon with its more difficult periods, and ultimately obfuscates the truth of our collective past.
When Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, the President’s House was the site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived and worked. The original building was demolished in 1832, but visitors today can still walk through its foundation, which sits near the Liberty Bell Center. The slavery exhibits at the President’s House include displays that memorialize the names and experiences of the nine people enslaved under Washington, along with relevant historical moments like Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793.
After the exhibit’s removal in January, the ATAC kept the space alive with numerous rallies. A few days prior to the court’s order to reinstall the panels, despite the leftover snow that piled along the sidewalks and on the lawn, hundreds of concerned Philadelphia community members gathered at the President’s House demanding the restoration of the slavery exhibit.
“African American history is American history, and we stand and continue to fight to make sure that Donald Trump will not whitewash the history here in the city of Philadelphia,” said Kenyatta Johnson, Philadelphia’s 2nd Council District President, as the crowd applauded. “It’s shameful that as we celebrate the 250th celebration of the birthplace of America that we have to be out here today advocating and fighting to make sure our true history—our true history, not his story—is known.”
Other speakers included a direct descendant of Black founding father Bishop Richard Allen, city council members, a historian, and a George Washington reenactor. They all echoed a similar message: the history presented by these panels needed to be restored because they tell an intrinsic part of American history, despite the current administration’s view that they were “disparaging.”
The main brick walls, where two long horizontal silver slabs hung covered in glue residue—a reminder of what had been there—had been plastered with various handmade flyers protesting the erasure of history and even recreating parts of the exhibit for those who came to view the site.
The City of Philadelphia filed their federal lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service the day the panels were initially removed, arguing the removal of the exhibit was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a 2006 Cooperative Agreement between Philadelphia and the federal government.
“This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again.”
“This action is a disservice to our city, our nation, and it denies future generations the chance to learn from our history, fostering an environment of ignorance rather than understanding,” said Catherine Hicks, the president of Philadelphia’s NAACP branch, to the crowd. “We must confront the complexities of our past, honoring the lives and legacies of those who suffered under the institution of slavery.”
Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher attending the rally, said every year she’d teach her students about the people Washington enslaved, particularly Ona Judge, a young woman who escaped to New Hampshire. This year, when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”
Gann said the exhibit’s removal reminded her of how vital educators are. “We can’t just feel satisfied that we’ve done enough,” she said. “Every year we have to renew our energy, our commitment to the truth, our commitment to Black uplift and celebrating stories of Black resilience and power and having our students see themselves in those stories.”
As the rally to restore history took place in Philadelphia, in Washington, the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held an oversight hearing titled “All in for America250: Public-Private Partnerships Supporting America’s Semiquincentennial on our Public Lands.”
During the hearing, Alan Spears, National Parks Conservation Association’s Senior Director for Cultural Resources, recalled that when he was young, his parents would take him to places like Gettysburg. He said it was there that his passion for American History manifested, but it didn’t “take hold” until he started seeing people who looked like him in those spaces.
“I think what we’re looking at right now is the danger of taking that in a completely opposite direction, where people don’t see themselves reflected or are seeing themselves actively removed and excised from our shared national narrative,” Spears said during the hearing. “We don’t need to go in that direction. This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again, about the times when we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature. That’s us too.”
John Garrison Marks, a historian and the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, had hoped that America’s anniversary would be an opportunity to “establish a more complete, more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of the nation’s history,” including the history of slavery.
Marks said people have debated Washington’s involvement in slavery for almost 250 years. The founding father enslaved people right up until the day he died, while privately writing about becoming “uneasy” with slavery and hoping that the institution would be abolished in southern states. Washington even circumvented a Pennsylvania law by deliberately moving the people he enslaved in and out of the state every six months to ensure they wouldn’t be freed by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Marks noted that the president understood the hypocrisy of leading a revolution to found a nation dedicated to the ideas of liberty and equality while enslaving people.
Marks said you can’t to talk about Washington without talking about his involvement in slavery. He argued that some people struggle to see Washington as “an actual human being” with “egregious flaws,” and instead see him as a symbol of the nation itself; for some, “criticizing Washington is criticizing America.”
“There are a lot of people whose sense of patriotism, whose sense of self, is tied to the idea that America is the land of the free, is tied up in the idea that this is a nation that should only be celebrated,” he said. “And when you try to introduce this idea that we need to reckon with the history of slavery to understand Washington, there are a lot of people who view that as kind of a personal attack.”
With Philadelphia having the potential to see so many visitors this year, not only for the 250th anniversary, but for the FIFA World Cup or the MLB All-Star Game, the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House was “a huge missed opportunity” to give people an uncensored history, one that Marks believes most people want to learn.
“On the eve of the 250th there are going to be people who are now waving the flag talking about how they love this country, and my thing is this: you can’t love a thing or a person until you know the good, the bad and the ugly,” Coard said after the rally. “So, the 250th shines a spotlight about the absolute necessity of knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your country.”
Following the initial legal victory, community members were cautiously hopeful.
“My heart is really exploding with joy, but it’s the type of joy that we often experience as Black people in this country,” said Michelle Flamer, a retired attorney, who helped get the exhibit installed over 15 years ago. “Where is the permanency? I want to make sure that this is permanent and not to ever be taken away. This history belongs here. There have been many people who have talked about moving it somewhere else or telling it, and I support efforts to continue to tell this history as broadly and as widely as possible, but it belongs here on this ground, because this is actually where the president’s house existed.”
Whatever the result of the administration’s fight to change the signage at the President’s House and other sites across the country, nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.
