Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility Rabb: Trump is attacking Black history and historical truth

Rabb: Trump is attacking Black history and historical truth

"This is how authoritarianism operates. These measures reflect the escalating fascism that our current federal government continues to embrace: a regime that wields state power to suppress inconvenient truths, glorify oppressive narratives, and punish those who dare to insist on accuracy, accountability and dignity."

Rep. Christopher M. Rabb    January 23, 2026 | 1:27 PM

PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 23 – State Rep. Chris Rabb issued the following statement in response to the removal of displays at the President’s House historic site ordered by the Trump administration:

“The Trump administration’s latest assault on public memory is not just petty—it is patently racist. Its effort to erase, distort or whitewash the historical record of Black people’s suffering, resistance and achievement is a direct attack on truth itself. And nowhere is this more painfully clear than in Philadelphia, where the federal government has dismantled critical interpretive displays at the President’s House historic site—an installation created precisely to confront the hypocrisy of a nation built on both liberty and enslavement.

“These moves are an affront not only to Black communities but to all communities of righteous struggle who understand that how history is told shapes what knowledge we recognize as worthy, and what pathways toward justice we believe are possible. When a government manipulates historical memory, it is not simply revising the past—it is attempting to dictate the moral horizon of the future.

“This is how authoritarianism operates. These measures reflect the escalating fascism that our current federal government continues to embrace: a regime that wields state power to suppress inconvenient truths, glorify oppressive narratives, and punish those who dare to insist on accuracy, accountability and dignity.

“Let’s be clear about what this is: a coordinated attempt to whitewash the foundational role of enslaved Africans in building this country and to undermine decades of scholarship, community advocacy and public engagement that fought to bring those stories into the open. To remove or dilute this history—especially at a site where the nation’s first president enslaved Black women, men and children—is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is an act of ideological violence.

“As a descendant of generations of Black freedom fighters and a legislator committed to historical integrity and racial justice, I condemn these actions unequivocally. Black history is American history. The histories of all oppressed peoples are American history. Attempts to bury these truths only reveal the fragility—and the dangerous ambitions—of those who fear them.

“We will not allow this revisionism, nor the authoritarian impulses behind it, to stand. Community leaders, educators, scholars and everyday Philadelphians must mobilize to defend and restore the narratives that honor the lives of those whom history tried—and failed—to silence.

“Our voices will never be muted in the cause of justice and full representation.”