Ona Judge escaped George Washington once.
Now the federal government is trying to make her disappear again.
I teach in Philadelphia, a short walk from the site of the President’s House. George and
Martha Washington lived there when the city was the nation’s capital. Nine enslaved people lived there too.
My own family fought in the American Revolution. We descend from the youngest boy to carry a musket at Lexington. So I grew up believing the American story belongs to every American. Not the cleaned-up version.
Ona Judge was one of those nine. The promise of the Revolution lived in that house. So did the cruelty of slavery.
That is not a footnote. That is the American story.
For 15 years, visitors to Independence National Historical Park could learn that story at an exhibit called “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” It told the truth about the people Washington enslaved there. It told the truth about Ona Judge, who chose freedom in 1796 and refused to return. It told the truth about a country that promised liberty while permitting slavery.
Then the Trump administration took the panels down.
In January, the National Park Service removed the exhibit on White House orders. The administration calls this kind of history too “divisive.” Empty bolt holes marked the brick where the panels used to hang. Only nine names remained, engraved on the wall. Austin. Christopher Sheels. Giles. Hercules. Joe Richardson. Moll. Oney Judge. Paris. Richmond. Someone left flowers.
The city of Philadelphia sued. A federal judge ordered the exhibit put back. The administration appealed. The case is now before the Third Circuit.
This is a fight over whether America is strong enough to tell the truth about itself.
And in that fight, we need heroes.
One of them is Judge Timothy K. Lewis, a retired Black federal appeals judge. President George H.W. Bush appointed him first as a district judge, then to the very Third Circuit now hearing this case.
Judge Lewis came up through the Republican legal world of Western Pennsylvania. His mentor was Wendell Freeland, a Tuskegee Airman who became a leading civil rights lawyer and a lifelong Black Republican in Pittsburgh.
That lineage matters.
In 2006, Judge Lewis testified at Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing. The two did not agree on much. Lewis told the committee he was “openly and unapologetically pro-choice.” But he stood up for Alito’s character because integrity mattered more than politics.
That kind of judge does not lend his name to easy fights.
A friend-of-the-court brief from the African Methodist Episcopal Church and historian Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar makes the stakes plain. Take Ona Judge and Bishop Richard Allen out of this story and you erase something we cannot afford to lose. Enslaved people and free Black people helped shape the conscience of this nation.
Allen was born into slavery. He bought his freedom. He founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, the first independent Black church in the United States.
He built a free Black community that pushed America closer to its own promise.
But what is divisive about telling children that enslaved people dreamed and planned and ran?
What is divisive about telling tourists that George Washington was both the father of his country and a man who held people as property?
The real division comes from the lie.
It comes from asking Black children to walk where their ancestors’ suffering has been scrubbed away. It comes from asking white children to grow up on a fairy tale. It comes from saying that loving America requires forgetting.
Real patriotism does not fear Ona Judge.
Real patriotism can stand in the President’s House and say: Here lived George Washington.
Here also lived the people he enslaved. Here a young woman named Ona Judge saw her chance and took it. Here the promise of America was broken. Here it was also pushed forward by people who refused to be owned.
This year America turns 250. The fight over how we tell our story will only get bigger.
Pressure to turn the founders into marble and the enslaved into ghosts. Pressure to call love of country a cleaned-up script we must recite.
But Ona Judge already showed us another way.
She told her own story with her feet.
She walked away from the President’s House. She made herself free. Washington tried to get her back. He failed.
More than two centuries later, no government should be allowed to do what Washington could not.
Ona Judge did not ask George Washington for freedom.
She took it.
The least we can do now is refuse to let anyone take her story away.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.