Prez House Blues

1/22/2026. Removal of captions and videos about the nine Africans enslaved by George and Martha Washington, past the 1790s PA6-month legal limit in the first US Prez House

My new Blues-a-week project is an homage to Sonia Sanchez’s discipline of a haiku a day. I put up my first this week after one of my elected representatives replied to my letter about our incursion into Venezuela with patently false pablum. Made me nuts. Then, I remembered: there’s an app for this. Black people had to create one to live and stay sane: work hollers, spirituals, and blues!

So, I said, I’ll write one blues lyric a week to stay sane as more and more boil-the-frog news comes in. Put one up Wednesday. I love to write the words. When I wrote with trepidation about singing these tiny lil lyrics to my friend, composer and musician Hannibal Lokumbe, he texted back: “Everyone has the right to sing.”

Then, yesterday, it happened: the threatened removal of Presidents House exhibits at 6th and Market here in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer captured and wrote in detail about what has been disappeared. Gone are illustrated history panels; videos for which I wrote scripts for director Louis Massiah are turned off.

So many people—scholars and passionate non-scholars—worked, argued, met, studied, wrote, agitated, and created art for this unique and necessary American project. But here we are. Because how dare we write their names, the nine enslaved Africans at the first American presidential residence, kept there beyond the six months that Pennsylvania allowed “owners” to keep people enslaved in the state? How dare we judge George Washington’s intent by his letter, sent to secretary Tobia Lear, outlining his strategy to move enslaved people out of the state for a bit, and then bring them back for another six months, “under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public”?

I read hundreds of pages of Washington’s letters, including those he sent for the rest of his life trying to track down Ona Judge, who left that house and lived free in New Hampshire until her death.

How dare we encode instructions to the future by writing about the two who escaped?

The names are still there, carved into stone.

And the day’s blues:

Shred the constitution; shred the golden rule,

Lie-and-murder playbook; use division is your tool,

Tryna hide Black stories? Ancestors give us fuel.