“Most Americans know George Washington as the “Father of the Nation.” Very few know the name Oney Judge.

Oney Judge was an enslaved Black woman owned by George and Martha Washington. She worked as Martha Washington’s personal attendant, meaning she was constantly present, constantly watched, and constantly vulnerable.

In 1796, while living in Philadelphia (then the nation’s capital), Oney Judge did something extraordinary.... she escaped.

She fled north to New Hampshire, where slavery was functionally ending. George Washington spent years trying to recapture her. He used federal resources. He enlisted friends. He tried quiet coercion and public pressure.

He failed.

Oney Judge lived the rest of her life as a free woman; poor, hunted, and unprotected by the law. But FREE! Years later, she gave interviews explaining exactly why she ran: she knew she was about to be given away like property.

For years, visitors to President’s House, a National Park Service site, could learn about Oney Judge and the nine enslaved people who lived and labored in the same house where Washington governed the nation.

That exhibit didn’t diminish the founders... It told the whole truth.

This exhibit was also removed by the Trump administration’s executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history,”.

Not revised.

Not expanded.

Removed.

Why?

Because stories like Oney Judge’s complicate the mythology that Trump and his supporters revel in. Bathe in. Believe in.

Our complicated history forces us to hold two truths at once:

• America was founded on ideals of liberty

• Those ideals were denied to the people who built it

If Oney Judge disappears from public memory, George Washington becomes uncomplicated again.

Good. Pristine. White.

If slavery becomes background noise, freedom becomes abstract. If resistance is erased, obedience becomes the default story.

Black History Month exists precisely because people like Oney Judge were never meant to be remembered.

She wasn’t loud.

She wasn’t armed.

She wasn’t protected.

She simply refused to remain property.

That is not “divisive history.” This is not "false" history. This IS

American history, a part that this administration seeks to erase.

And if the truth makes us uncomfortable, that’s not a flaw, that’s the point.”