President's House - with memorial to enslaved Africans - opens on Independence Mall

In bitter cold flecked by an occasional flurry, as hundreds looked on, the President's House memorial, which marks the site where George Washington and John Adams conducted their presidencies and where Washington held at least nine enslaved Africans, opened to the public Wednesday in a 45-minute ceremony.

Mayor Nutter and key historians and activists stood before a granite wall incised with the names of the nine as the official ribbon was cut at 12:45 p.m. Immediately, a great throng of people pressed forward into the commemorative exhibition, just north of the Liberty Bell Center on Independence Mall.

It was here that Washington held Oney Judge, Hercules, Austin, Richmond, Moll, Paris, Giles, Joe, and Christopher Sheels more than two centuries ago. Yet to many in the audience, including community activists who pushed hard for a memorial to those held in bondage, these nine speak loudly now to the contradictions, indignities, denials, and avoidance that still riddle race relations in the United States.

In an eloquent speech, Nutter emphasized the importance of the site and exhibition, linking them to an emerging public willingness to discuss the real history of race in the United States.

"We gather here today at this historic place in Philadelphia not for presidents but rather on behalf of millions of silent voices - the enslaved Africans upon whose backs great wealth was accumulated, both here in the North and in the South," Nutter said. "This place, 'The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,' is a critical part of the national history, and now it becomes a living story for us to impart to our children . . . and to each other."

The President's House, he said, embodies "the contradiction" between slavery and freedom at the heart of the nation's birth, and the opening of the installation inaugurates "the dialogue" about that contradiction.

The site consists of an architectural echo of the house that stood at Sixth and Market Streets, with the stories of the Washington and Adams presidencies outlined in text exhibits and on painted-glass wall panels.

But here the familiar lineaments of the Founding Fathers are viewed in the context of a nation willing to sacrifice the freedom of Africans for the bounty that their labor could bestow on a white elite.