It rankled, and one of them argued that the narratives should be more inclusive. "Hey, we need to get some more diverse stories going here," he urged, according to Joe Becton, a park ranger since 1986. But, says Becton, it "didn't have much impact."

In the early 1980s, Charles Blockson, curator of the Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University, argued that at least the abolitionists, who named the Liberty Bell and transformed it into an antislavery symbol, should get a nod. The park eventually agreed, but in the view of many, that nod often amounted to only cursory mentions at the old Liberty Bell pavilion.

In the 1990s, a new management plan acknowledged that African American history should be a part of park offerings, and suggested African American programming for Washington Square. Again, not much happened.

But since 2002 - when controversy erupted over slavery in George Washington's household and the park's failure to acknowledge it - a great change has swept over Independence Park.

Becton now conducts popular Underground Railroad walking tours.

Liberty Bell visitors now hear about abolitionism, slavery, women's rights, immigrant struggles, human rights around the world - and the role the bell has played in all.

The National Constitution Center now displays African American artifacts found during the archaeological excavation that preceded the center's construction. A private organization, it has presented programs and exhibitions of particular significance to African Americans and is part of the city's Quest for Freedom trail, which traces the course of the Underground Railroad.

In a year or so, according to officials there, visitors at the African American Museum of Philadelphia a block off Independence Mall on Seventh Street will see a new permanent exhibition on 18th- and early-19th-century black life in Philadelphia.

Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, another Quest for Freedom stop, is raising funds to build a $12 million museum next to its historic church at Sixth and Lombard, for exhibitions on founder Richard Allen and Sarah Allen and the church's role in the beginnings of black America.

The park has agreed to let the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia set up shop in the First Bank of the United States on Third Street.

Lights of Liberty, the sound-and-light show offered at the park, acquaints visitors with slave-owner Benjamin Franklin, and slave liberators - the British Redcoats.

Once Upon a Nation, the private group that organizes costumed storytelling around the park, includes the stories of Oney Judge, one of Washington's slaves who escaped from Philadelphia in 1796; William and Peter Still and Fredrick Douglass, the great black abolitionists; Henry Box Brown, a slave who mailed himself from Richmond, Va., to Philadelphia; James Forten, a black businessman who worked closely with Mother Bethel's Richard Allen; and many other stories previously untold in the park.

Christ Church, a park partner, has begun exploring the significance of slavery in its own past and is now presenting performances in its burial grounds dramatizing stories connected with the church and the early city.

And if all goes according to plan (plans that have been delayed several times already), a memorial to the President's House, the nation's first executive mansion, will open sometime in 2010.

Located at the doorstep of the Liberty Bell Center at Sixth and Market, the memorial will commemorate not only Washington and his successor, John Adams, who also lived there, but also the nine enslaved Africans in the Washington household, and by extension, all who have lived in bondage on American soil.

The impetus for all this was the controversy that erupted in 2002 when it was reported that visitors to the new Liberty Bell Center would walk over the unmarked spot where Washington quartered enslaved Africans. Incensed citizens groups and scholars pressed the park to acknowledge the house and all its occupants, free and powerful, unfree and powerless.

In the ensuing tussle, a sheaf of neglected stories was uncovered and viewed as if for the first time.

"In many ways, Independence Park can be seen as a shrine to the civil religion of democracy," says Jed Levin, head of the Independence Living History Center, a new public archaeology lab analyzing more than a million artifacts, many related to early black life, that were unearthed in the park in recent years.

"It was very much a shrine, with several key icons that told a story about who we thought we were as a nation," Levin continues. "It had the value to make people feel good about their country. The story told . . . was not untrue, but it was so abbreviated as to be untrue about who we are and what our origins are. Now we've moved to a much more complex understanding of our origins and who we are as a nation."