New Holiday in Philly Is a Response to Trump Hiding History

On a judge was one of nine enslaved black people forced to work and live at President George Washington's Philadelphia home before she escaped to freedom. The current president has tried to suppress her story and the story of other enslaved people who were held here in Philadelphia. Now, there's an extraordinary and permanent response. This Thursday is the first ever annual Ona Judge Day in the city. It's Tuesday, May 19th. I'm Trinari, and here's how activists, a journalist, and a city council resolution gave us on a judge day every May 21st. I'm here with Ronnie Polineski, senior editor at Philadelphia Magazine and Carl Singley, retired lawyer and co-founder of the owner-of-judge coalition. Thank you both so much for joining me. Let's get right into it. First off, congratulations through the efforts of the Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Citizen, avenging the Ancestors Coalition, and the owner-judge coalition. You all successfully petitioned the city to officially recognize May 21st as Ona Judge Day in Philly. Before we get into how you all were able to pull this off, let's talk about who On a judge was. So I'd like to say who is on a judge, not who was on a judge, because her spirit, her bravery, her resilience, her audacity lives on from 1796. And I think I was intrigued. I have actually read Erica. Don Barr's book. Never caught. Never caught the Washington's relentless pursuit of their slave owner judge. I've read it. I've listened to the book. I'm reading it again. And I think Ronnie's reaction was the same as mine. The idea, the audacity of a woman in 1796 in Philadelphia to decide to escape bondage from the most powerful man. in North America and decide that she wanted to be free at all cost and eluded every effort that he made, every entree, every threat, every plea to return into bondage. It's just stunning. And she's one of those unsunged heroes who sort of represent the sort of audacity, the resilience, the courage and the bravery of black women. for the last 250 years, but women in general. And so she is a role model for the young people who can understand when the times seem the darkest, when you have no right to aspirations and hope. You get on a ship called Nancy and travel all the way to New Hampshire and live to be 75 years old.

So I was inspired. And I'm telling you, even now when I think about it, I kind of laugh out loud when I think about it. Because when Washington was sending people trying to trap her, con her, she said what we said in the black community. Ain't studying it. Ain't studying you. I'm staying here when they threatened to harm her family. And if you think about it, she had help from Absalon Jay Jones and Richard Allen. who were also prominent Philadelphians at the time? Absolutely, absolutely. In the free black community here. So the idea that we talk about Rosa Parks, we talk about Sojourna, Truth, Harriet Tubman, all of whom are real she-rose, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mamie Till, Ida B. Wells, all of them who demonstrated courage in the face of audacity. I mean, of. overwhelming force and disadvantage. The idea that an uneducated black woman would slip away with the help for black people, on her own, get on a ship, no money, no clothes, and decide to start a life. Freedom was that important. So I just felt, and I still felt, feel that that was the story that needed to be told. Now the The fuse for this was Ronnie in Philadelphia Magazine. I know Mike and ATAC has been celebrating it informally over the last years, but Philadelphia Magazine and Ronnie decided, let's get a petition started. Let's light a fuse, because this is a story that needs to be told. And we came alone. We got our marching orders, and we said, we're in. Ronnie, how did this collaboration come about? So I had been aware of ATAC from the very beginning. And what's ATAC? Oh, avenging the Ancestors Coalition. So Michael Cord was the one who was the co-founder of that way back. So just real quick. 2010. Well, but the house, the foundation was uncovered back in. 2002. And when you're saying the house, you're referring to the president's house at sixth and market streets. So the way this had started was that Liberty Bell Pavilion was going to be moved from one side of Independence Park and it was going to be placed at the corner of Sixth and Market Street. It was because it just needed like expansion. In the course of doing excavation there, they came upon what they realized was the foundation for the president's house. And the more they dug and sort of preserved it, they realized that slaves had been held there. And it was such a riveting thing for people to think, oh, wait, George Washington had slaves in Philadelphia. I mean, this was a free community for blacks, which was stunning to hear. So, and a lot of people were very upset to hear this. And Michael and a growing number of people were saying, we need to memorialize the enslaved people who lived here because to put the liberty bell on top of where people were enslaved is just a joke. It's a hypocrisy. It's a desecration of this land.

In a house, your body belonged to everybody. So I don't know that that was part of it, but if I were 22 looking around, it must have been on her mind. So that's why she fled. And when she fled, her life wasn't easy. I mean, she was doing like hard manual labor. The money was always tight. She was always looking over her shoulder. Not only she was still part of the Washington's estate, but her three children were because they were born to her and she was their property. So she was always worried about what might happen. And so for her. You know, the stakes were so high. There was so much to lose. And the fact that she was asked toward the end of her life, basically, would you do it again? And she was like in a heartbeat. Of course, I died. I am dying a free woman. So it's just the most stunning, beautiful story. To have somebody try to soften it to be less than what it is. It's just, it's insulting. It's really insulting. So in her later years, Ona was interviewed in a abolitionist newspaper. And this is the thing that's been a real gift, is that we have her actual words. Other enslaved people, we don't have their actual words, but we have hers. And she was asked basically, would she do it again? And she said absolutely. And she talked about how she was, you know, she is a child of God and entitled to the freedoms and liberties of a child of God. One other quick thing, too. She never revealed the names of the people who worked to help her escape after several people attempted to get her to do it. The other sad thing is she outlived her children. So she buried her own children. And I think as Runny is pointing out, that's a different story than Harriet Tubman. It's a different story than Sojournal Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer. It in and of itself, 1796 and the audacity and the courage that that took and just trying to imagine how apprehensive she was every day of her life. We have more on this story after the break.

May 21st was the day that she escaped. And- Yep. What you all are telling me, the Washington family continued for years to try to find her and try to bring her back into slavery. And what you were saying earlier, too, Ronnie, is that this was a time that American society was horrific and deadly and dehumanizing black people at the time we were thought of as property during American slavery. And so the idea of someone... I guess, giving that justification while she was treated well. She got nice clothes or the folks that lived in worked and lived in this home at 6th and Market Streets were given clothes and things like that. But I recently, as the legal battle was happening at the president's house, I went on a walking tour with 1838 Black Metropolis. And it was focused on the free black society. of like 1838. And there's this space in between the president's house, the area where you see the names listed and the Liberty Bell. And it's a small space. Yeah. It's like a wooden, like wooden slabs almost with words and affirming words and things like that. But the tour guides told us this is where they slept. I looked at my son and he looked at me and I'm like, this is a very small space for even the both of us. So nine people fitting in here, it doesn't seem like great conditions. Trinay, let me say this. Have you've seen the pictures of slaves crammed in the holes of slave ships lined up like dominoes next to each other shackled together. So what you saw, even in those quarters, relatively speaking, was... a far cry from how the rest of the slaves. You had house negroes and you had field negroes. Here's what I want to say to you about the location and the dispute over which panels go back up or don't go back up. The story isn't the panels. The panels and their removal are simply artifacts of contemporary efforts to erase an inconvenient truth. That's what the removal of the panels. Now, there were 34 panels. Only 16 were restored, by the way.

And one of our colleagues in a call yesterday, Sarah Lomax at Word, basically said she went down there recently and discovered that it's a mess. And the fact of the matter is, on a judge coalition decided we are not going to wait for the federal government to tell this story. We're not going to wait for the courts to litigate which version of history gets preserved so that we're going to tell this story both in terms, and I'll get into the details later, but we're going to approach this thing using contemporary storytelling that's going to be analog and digital. analog in the sense of panel discussions, but we also are creating augmented reality apps so that someone can download a QR code from certain locations in the city of Philadelphia, near the president's house, and then point their smartphones at those murals or those empty spaces and reconstruct that story. We're using social media, we're using all of the platforms. and we're using all of these ways of telling that story, including teach-ins with the superintendent of schools. We're going to do it at the Free Library, at Girard College, at Belmont Mansion, where scholars, black and white, women, will continue to tell the story. So in a way, the decision to remove those panels is a gift because we were galvanized. That decision lit a fuse about let's make sure that this so-called inconvenient truth that July 4th, 2026 does not pass without the world knowing the true story of honor judge. You all got this done at an incredibly pivotal moment in American history. This year is the 250th anniversary of the nation. Do you think it's patriotic to point out some of the difficult and troubling aspects of American history, the hypocrisies, the ironies, and why is it important? Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's just true. It's just true. It's how can anybody be vilified for pointing out something that's true? What's true is that. Truth to power. Truth to power, but, you know, It's just true. And that is the founding contradiction of this country, is that we talked about freedom and liberty while enslaving human beings. Wow, that is, that's something. And as I had said the other day when Carl and I were talking, I think America at the age of the wise, mature age of 250, I think we are capable of holding our arms wide enough to hold all of what is true. Not some of it, all of it. And all of it is that those founding fathers wrote some of the most beautiful words that had to do with the liberty and freedom and personal agency. And they held slaves. We have to hold our arms for all of it because it's all true. And to try to shut out any part of it is...

It's like what a toddler would do. Well, we're 250 years old now. We are past toddler infancy stage. It's time now to just be wise and accept all of what's true. We can't untrue it, but let's tell it and bigger. Let's learn from it. Let's learn from it. And to answer your question in a different way, it is unpatriotic not to. So if you look at the owner judge logo, it is red, white, and blue. And what you'll also see at the... the event that we're having on the 21st, I will be wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie. That's because that history, that tie, that flag, those colors don't belong to the bad guys. A lot of people lost their lives to argue. about those freedoms, even when the reality was different from the lives that people lived on a daily basis. So it's unpatriatic to not bring out those truths. They are inconvenient, but the story is going to be told. Now, at this moment in our history, when there are reasons to believe that all is lost and American exceptionalism is no longer a reality. It's time for people from different sectors, different backgrounds to stand up and say, we don't accept, we're not discouraged by the state of affairs that we see in our country. Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends to world justice. I have to tell you that over the last year, I've had my doubts. And that comes from a black kid who grew up in Alabama. in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, marched in the Selma to Montgomery March, and was the beneficiary over the last 60 years of all of the civil rights changes, and now to see those eroded, I'm not discouraged at all, I'm encouraged. And we defy, we struggle, we use whatever tools are at our disposal, because as Lincoln said, that if this nation can long endure. And we've survived a lot, but I think this is one of the major challenges. It's an existential threat to basic American principles and ideas. And everybody who cares about what this nation was intended to be, they have a sacred obligation to defy, to resist, and fight in whichever ways they can. This is our country, and we can't advocate our obligation to protect. what it has become as opposed to what it was. Where are we currently with the legal battle over the President's House exhibit?

I think it's important to acknowledge that the legal battle is an important effort to vindicate an idea. And the idea that it seeks to vindicate is what Ronnie talked about earlier. It's the idea that these inconvenient truths ought to be easily eliminated, erased at the whim. and caprice of whoever happens to be in power at a given moment in time. And it's an act of defiance. In Philadelphia, it's ground zero, as Ronnie pointed out. We have the only exhibit of its kind in Philadelphia. But if you think about it, what if all of a sudden, and that's not likely to happen any more than it's snowing in Philadelphia in May or June, is what if the Trump administration said, you know what? Put the panels back up just like they are. Are we going to stop our work? No, we're not. Because guess what? Putting them up and taking them down is whimsical. And we shouldn't be at the mercy of whoever happens to be in power. Now, the problem with litigation, and that's why you have alternative strategies, it is an orduous time-consuming process. My prediction is that there's no chance that those panels go back up before next year this time. at the earliest. So what are we as responsible citizens to do, knowing what we now know about the story that we are now trying to tell? So what are we to do? Just accept that as the end of our struggle? That has never been the case. This story is too vital to too many different sectors of society. And we are presenting for the nation an example. of special, eloquent, strategic resistance to an effort to change the way history is told. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll have more after this.

Ronnie, why was it important for a media outlet to come together with community activists and groups to make Ona Judge Day happen? I was so impressed with what Michael Cord's group did, like every year they would have their own, I want to judge celebrations. And when the panels were taken down, it seemed like they need an assist. Like they can't tell on a judge's story to the depth and breath. of people who are, I think, available to listen to it and hear it. And I thought, this is just wrong. What that group did in bringing that memorial together took everything. It took all of the kind of work that real organizing and community discussions and civic engagement. It took all of it and it was being torn down. And, you know, the media, it's terrible how we've been seen as like the enemy of the people, but. The thing that we can do is we can amplify voices. And sometimes people will say, oh, you know, the media gives voice to the voice list. I totally disagree with that. Those people have voices and they're screaming, but the people who should be listening aren't. So what the media could do is we can amplify those so that they have no choice but to hear them. And so with the story, I thought, Ona's voice is not being heard. Ona's story is not being heard. And the advocacy groups that want the memorial restored, I don't think their voices are being heard. And so the media, we could amplify the voice by telling a story. I had, you know, the magazine has a different section that has opinion. So I wrote this opinion that said we need to make a national own a judge day. But I wanted it to not just be like my opinion because I thought Michael court has been all over this for years. So I interviewed Michael and Carl and Chris Rab had tried to get a declaration through in the state house, you know, a few years back and just said, what do you think about a local? annual official on a judge day. And everybody was like, we're all about it. So I wanted to be sure that the people who had already been doing the work of telling her story didn't feel like there was something untoward about a columnist saying, here's what we need. And they might have come back and said, oh my God, we don't need that. The thing we need is this, you know. But they were so all about it. And so that I wrote the story. And then, um, didn't know if the story was going to get any kind of, like if the concept of this would be able to get any traction. So that's when we thought, well, why don't we just do a petition to layer on top of what the opinion piece was trying to do itself? That's when we got the petition going. And let me tell you my reaction.

to it. It was audacious. I choose that word in the sense that the magazine and Ronnie had a choice to not do it. And that happens. The one thing that a lot of journalists are electing to do in this climate is they're not audacious. They're not telling the stories that need to be told. And I use that word because that requires that you have a profound sense of the righteousness of what it is you're doing. And you are willing to take a public stand. And whatever slings and arrows you get, you said, bring them on. But I will be judged by the... decency, and the truth of the work I'm doing. So when I talked to Runny, I think we met, what, two months ago, if it was that long ago, maybe a month ago. Two months, just about, yeah. And you remember Obama wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope. Yeah. On the judge was audacious. That's a word that describes courage and willingness and resilience and resourcefulness to get to the truth and to vindicate and advocate for the truth. So we welcome Michael. We welcome Ronnie. We welcome all allies from whatever sector of society you come who need to stand up in this moment and says that we are really better than people think we are as a country. Wow, so profound. What sorts of events are happening on Thursday, May 21st to celebrate on a Judge Day? What we have planned is an event at the Independence Visitor Center that will feature Dr. Dunbar. as well as a proclamation from the city honoring on a judge day that Cindy Bass introduced, as well as a proclamation or resolution recognizing the work that has been done. We expect that the mayor will speak as well. It's going to be well attended. We're going to honor my court and the work that he's done. We're going to honor Ross McPherson, whose preservation alliance has been working with one of the groups that in 2010 started this work. And we're going to do it with the view. When you look out of Independence Visitor Center, you can see the president's house. within literally eyesight. So it's going to be a dramatic event. And we got people from our group as multiracial, ecumenical, non-partisan. I was going to say non-political, but whenever you aggressively assert truth, that's a political statement. So we're not non-political in that sense. And Ronnie is going to be there with her crew, and it's going to be a time that we are celebrating.

And we have subsequent events planned. What I did want to tell you, there's a mural that's being installed in two days after the 21st in New Hampshire that honors her. We intend to either install a similar mural at the African American Museum. And if the panels are not restored, we will get as many of those that we can get and do install them as artifacts at the exterior of the African-American Museum, which, by the way, is one of our allies and is celebrating their 50th anniversary this July as well. There's going to be panel discussions over the next several weeks and days at Girard College with women scholars. The superintendent of schools is going to interview Dr. Dunbar. We're distributing thousands of books in the young people's readers' edition and for high school students at Gerard College in the public school system. We have discussions at the free library. So we're going to be celebrating this all the way up. to July 4th and beyond. So exciting. Is the event that's happening at Independence Visitor Center, is that free or is it a ticketed event? Well, it's free. Let me put it like that. We're raising money, and anybody who wants to give money can do so by sending it to the owner-judge coalition at the Urban Affairs Coalition. But it is free and open to the public. Their invitations will go out, but we're not turning away anybody. Carl and Ronnie, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of CityCast, Philly today. Thanks for having us for that. It was a pleasure. Always good to see my buddy, Ronnie, and to tell our story. What an incredible story. That's all for today here on CityCast Philly. If you enjoyed this episode about how On a Judge Day came to be, share this episode with a friend. Also, rate the show, leave us a review, and hit that subscribe button. Be sure to sign up for our morning newsletter to learn more about what else Philly's talking about. And don't forget, you can support the show and get great perks by becoming a citycastfilly neighbor at membership.citycass.fm. We'll be back tomorrow morning with the results of the election. Talk to you later. Bye.