To the framers of the Constitution, who she was didn't matter - she was three-fifths of a person, a chattel slave.

Oney Judge was only about 16 when she came to Philadelphia, the nation's temporary capital, in 1790.

A few years later, she learned she was about to be given away by the Washingtons as a wedding gift. She gathered herself up and refused, defying the president, the Constitution, and all the powerful forces arrayed against her.

She escaped.

"I was struck by just the sheer improbability of what she did," said Cheryl J. LaRoche, a historical and archaeological consultant who worked on the excavation of the President's House, Washington's Philadelphia home, during the summer of 2007.

"Women, and black women in particular, were so deeply limited by the whole society, and black women, of course, by slavery. They were the last people, you would think, who would have the wherewithal to attempt to escape."

"Oney's sense of her self and of her self-worth," LaRoche said, led the young woman "to make a claim for herself and for her freedom."

For decades Judge's story went untold at Independence National Historical Park, site of the President's House, where the Washingtons lived with Judge, eight other slaves, and a group of servants. But controversy fueled in 2002 by the park's silence revived the unspoken story of Judge and many others, giving voice to their narratives.

Now a park memorial is planned for the house site at Sixth and Market. A sheaf of new stories, such as Judge's, will be told there, and are being woven into programs and talks throughout the park as officials seek to broaden the presentation of 18th-century life, revising and amplifying the story of the nation's founding in the process.

"This is a marketing society and, in a cynical sense, black tourism is growing and there is a strong desire from black tourists for black history," said Sharon Ann Holt, program director for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers. "I don't think that's necessarily a negative. This story is hot.

"But where that hotness is coming from is a new mobilization of black folk looking for history not just to worship, but history they can use. African American history retains its political core. They understand that knowing the past becomes important to shaping the present and the future. That's big. That's not cynical."

Oney Judge was born on Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia around 1774. Her mother, Betty, was an enslaved seamstress and her father a white indentured tailor, Andrew Judge, according to research by Ed Lawler Jr., the independent historian whose dogged efforts precisely located the President's House and established the probable location of its slave quarters.

Austin, an older child of Betty's, was Oney Judge's half-brother. He also came with the presidential family to Philadelphia, where Lawler believes he worked as a stablehand and slept in the slave quarters with fellow slaves Giles and Paris.

Judge, on the other hand, slept in the main house and, for a period at least, had her own room. She was strong, by her own account, and like her parents excelled with needle and thread. Her skin was the color of pale coffee, and sprinkled with freckles.

Martha Washington's needs were Oney Judge's first priority; she was a body servant to the first lady and a companion to her grandchildren, accompanying them to various events, including the circus.

It was during those trips, presumably, that Judge became friendly with free Africans. There were about 6,500 in Pennsylvania in 1790, an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 in Philadelphia. A large number lived on the block where the National Constitution Center now sits at the northern end of Independence Mall, only two blocks from the President's House.

On that block, in a small brick house on North Fifth Street rented by James Oronoko Dexter, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, William Gray, Dexter, and other free blacks met to discuss issues of pressing concern to their community. In 1787 the group had founded the Free African Society, the nation's first black self-help and civic organization; a few years later it was meeting at Dexter's house to discuss formation of the city's first black churches - Jones' St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, with Dexter and neighbors Israel Burgow and Robert Venable in leadership roles, and Richard Allen's Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

As far as UCLA history professor Gary Nash is concerned, these efforts of Philadelphia's early free African leaders mark them as "the founding fathers of black America."