The resistance was born on a Friday morning at the Gen. George A. McCall School photocopy machine.
The copier spat the message out on yellow, purple, and orange paper — page after page amplifying the same sentiment scrawled on each in big black letters: Learn all history.
In the aftermath of the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site on Jan. 22, fourth-grade social studies teacher Kaity Berlin wanted to convert her rage into something productive, she said. She quickly thought of the words on one of her shirts: “Teach all history.” So she gathered some teacher friends, took to the photocopier, and headed to Independence National Historical Park.
Berlin wasn’t the only one who saw the shallow silver frames at the President’s House as a void screaming to be filled.
The exhibit included a series of signs describing what life was like for those enslaved by George Washington at the site and his complicated relationship with the institution of slavery. The exhibit was dismantled last week, several months after President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order requiring the review and potential removal of displays at the national parks that “inappropriately disparage” the United States.
The city asked a federal justice to order that no more exhibits be removed from the President’s House and that the exhibits that were already removed be kept safe. In a hearing Friday, judge Cynthia M. Rufe didn’t issue a ruling but asked the Trump administration attorney that the exhibits remain untouched so she can review them Monday.
Over that first weekend colorful signs populated the walls, reenactors donned historic garb and positioned themselves along the red brick pillars with a flourish, some people held giant replica signs of the ones that were removed, and others laid flowers delicately across the facility.
To Berlin, whose school is a few blocks from the President’s House, posting the colorful signs was just a quick action she could take in her 45-minute prep period.
“It was just a cathartic way to be like ‘Ugh, this sucks,’” Berlin said.
But it soon became the first of numerous forms of activism and art that filled the space as more and more Philly-area residents yearned for a similar way to express their opposition to the removal of the plaques.
Media ranged from cardboard to poster board. Tools included Sharpies and pens. Many of the more informal signs were affixed with painter’s tape to nooks in the brick structure and empty metallic shells where the original signs hung. Some more official-looking signs included QR codes and printed messages balanced on easels. Others were replicas of the signs that were there made with assistance from professional printing services.
Ted Zellers, a property manager in North Philly, took a more full-body approach to his protest. He found a high-resolution image online of one of the removed signs, titled “Slavery in the President’s House,” got it printed twice, fashioned a sandwich board out of the posters, and became “a living sign,” he said.
It was an educational tool he could wield, but it doubled as a warning.
“I hope people will think about what other information is under threat of being disappeared,” Zellers said.
He expected to be the only person in the park with a sign, but was heartened to see a few dozen others there withstanding the 17-degree air interspersed with sharp winds slicing through the open air exhibit.
Albert DerMovsesian from Willow Grove, who came to the site equipped with one vertical sign detailing the labor that took place in the house and a horizontal one titled “The Dirty Business of Slavery,” found himself similarly pleased to see so many like-minded others around him.
In the park he saw little kids writing on pieces of paper pasted to the walls, a woman leaving a sign with the names of those enslaved at the site, and people adorning the structure with flowers.
“It reminded me that I wasn’t alone,” DerMovsesian said.
“We don’t need 350 million Malcolm X’s to make the country better,” Zellers said. “We just need a lot of regular people who recognize that they’re part of networks and who can take some action and amplify what’s going on, pass it onm and get other people engaged.”
The collage of images developed organically, but hearkened back to a long lineage of protest art that has become increasingly prevalent under the Trump administration, said Nicolo Gentile, an artist and adjunct faculty member at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Gentile likened the immediacy and style of the displays at the President’s House to the enlarged version of Trump’s birthday card to financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that popped up on the National Mall in Washington last month.
The assortment of papers reading “learn all history” gets its power from the relative anonymity of its author, Gentile said, as well as its use of repetition.
“It starts to create a texture of sound of a greater voice the way that the many voices of a chant during protest does,” he said.
While Berlin said she doesn’t see herself as an artist, she appreciates the punch of a stark and direct message through signage and art.
“I do love the impact of a good simple piece,” she said.
In some cases, political art can be used to “accelerate progress,” Gentile said, but sometimes its best use is halting regression and “to wedge our foot in the door as progress may seem to be closing.”
“This work seems to be the foot in the door,” he said.
