ATAC Position Paper

Membership and Objectives

Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) is a broad-based organization of African American historians, attorneys, elected officials, religious leaders, media personalities, community activists, and registered voters. ATAC was founded in 2002 to compel the National Park Service (NPS) and Independence National Historical Park (INHP) to finally agree to the creation of a prominent Slavery Commemoration as a key component of the President's House project. The purpose of this Slavery Commemoration is to honor primarily the nine African descendants enslaved by President George Washington at the President's House, which is also known as America's first "White House" and which was located at the current site of the new Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia at Sixth and Market Streets. Those nine were among the 316 Black men, women, and children enslaved by Washington at his Mt. Vernon, Virginia plantation.

After years of letter-writing campaigns, petition drives, demonstrations, public forums, press conferences, and negotiations, ATAC was victorious in persuading the NPS and INHP to finally concede to the creation of this absolutely historic Slavery Commemoration, now called the President's House/Slavery Commemoration Project.

Also, ATAC provided voluminous documentation to city and federal officials who, along with state officials and private contributors, provided complete funding for this nearly $11 million project. It should be noted that it was former Mayor John F. Street who was the first official to begin funding the project and who created the project's ongoing steering arm, namely the Mayor's Oversight Committee.

ATAC is now intensifying its continuing call for government officials, labor unions, and private contractors to provide iron-clad assurances that "today's free Black sons and daughters" of "yesterday's enslaved Black fathers and mothers" will play a substantive and conspicuous role as construction workers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, landscapers, laborers, etc. in the building of the project This role is consistent with Philadelphia City Council's 2002 resolution "calling upon the National Park Service (and INHP) to ensure equitable economic participation in opportunities arising from the... project..."

Requirement

ATAC requires the Slavery Commemoration because justice demands it. Justice demands it because ATAC's ancestors as forced laborers transformed America into the economic world power that it remains today, because ATAC's ancestors died for America in all of its wars, and because ATAC's ancestors had their freedom, culture, family, language, land, religion, name, and often their sanity, limbs, and even lives ruthlessly stripped from them for three centuries by America (and other European-initiated slave trading countries) in a manner unlike anything ever experienced in the history of humankind. ATAC also requires it because it an essential step toward telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about American history.