Universities nationwide remove historical artwork deemed offensive.
Some of you maybe aware of Benjamin Banneker's historic letter to Thomas Jefferson on August 19, 1791, arguing eloquently that "…however variable we may be in Society or religion, however, diversifyed in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him [God]."
I wonder if any of you have ever read Jefferson's response? I had not until last night when I discovered it by accident. I was looking for a book for my son on my bookshelf and I stumbled across an old library book titled "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson." I then remembered that I had bought it for $1 at a local library give away some years ago. By chance, I happened to open the book to page 932 and there it was. I then did a google search to find it online so that I wouldn't have to retype it for this post.
The search results shocked me, but were informative. Page after page of high school and college course assignments all about Banneker's historic letter to Jefferson and how he cleverly employed rhetorical strategies to prove Jefferson to be a "hypocrite." But none of these sites ever mentioned Jefferson's response.
After refining my search, I finally found it.
https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/benjamin-banneker
In his reply to Banneker on August 30, Jefferson wrote,
"No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black bretheren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America…I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet…because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them."2
The same day, Jefferson wrote to the Marquis de Condorcet:
"I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician. I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Patowmac, and in the intervals of his leisure, while on that work, he made an Almanac for the next year, which he sent me in his own handwriting, and which I enclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him. Add to this that he is a very worthy and respectable member of society. He is a free man."3
It should go without saying that it saddens me deeply on behalf of all peoples that young Americans, comprising the "1%" of those most free and privileged on our planet, the vast majority of which who have never read any of Jefferson's writings, including the most sacred of all, the Declaration of Independence, are so possessed and deluded by destructive ideology that they are actively calling for the destruction of his statues and memorials.
What is even less known among our youth is that Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence was revised by the Continental Congress to eliminate the justifiable attack on King George for encouraging the slave trade…(see image)
Jefferson knew that such compromises with principle struck at the heart of the nation’s security and integrity. In 1820, six years before his death, he wrote these melancholy words:
"But this momentous question (slavery), like a fire bell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away, and my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it."
What is indisputable is that this "slave owner" penned words of Truth so powerful that it laid the foundation for liberty worldwide, not only for African Americans, but for countless other oppressed peoples around the world, many of which who came here with nothing, worked hard to learn our language and history, so that they too could be known as "Americans."
We all need to come together as Americans now more than ever before and stand united against those malevolent forces which seek to divide and destroy us.
Curated for #informationwar (by @wakeupnd)
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