From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to
take down his memorial
By: Christopher Wilson
A direct descendant of
Thomas Jefferson has called for the memorial to the third president to be
removed from Washington, D.C.
Writing in the New York Times Monday morning, Lucian K.
Truscott IV said that his ancestor’s former estate at Monticello is enough of a
tribute and that the Jefferson Memorial, located next to the Tidal Basin in the
nation’s capital, should be replaced with a statue honoring the abolitionist
hero Harriet Tubman.
“The memorial is a
shrine to a man who during his lifetime owned more than 600 slaves and had at
least six children with one of them, Sally Hemings,” Truscott wrote. “It’s a
shrine to a man who famously wrote that ‘all men are created equal’ in the
Declaration of Independence that founded this nation — and yet never did much
to make those words come true. Upon his death, he did not free the people he
enslaved, other than those in the Hemings family, some of whom were his own
children. He sold everyone else to pay off his debts.”
In the piece, Truscott
argues that Monticello serves as an “almost perfect memorial” to the nation’s
third president. In Truscott’s opinion, Monticello notes Jefferson’s major
contributions to the creation of the United States — including the Declaration
of Independence — but also includes his history as a slave owner, or as
Truscott writes, “it reveals him with his moral failings in full, an imperfect
man, a flawed founder.”
“I am the sixth-generation
great-grandson of a slave owner,” Truscott continues. “My cousins from the
Sally Hemings family are also the great-grandchildren of a slave owner. But the
difference is that our great-grandfather owned their great-grandmother. My
family owned their family. That is the American history you will not learn when
you visit the Jefferson Memorial. But you will learn it when you visit
Monticello: There’s now an exhibit of Sally Hemings’s bedroom in her cavelike
living quarters in the south wing, a room my brother and I used to play in when
we were boys.”
Truscott, 73, is a novelist and columnist for
Salon whose grandfather was a general during World War II.
In a July feature in Smithsonian Magazine,
another Jefferson descendant, Shannon LaNier, was photographed in the same
style as his sixth great-grandfather but opted not to wear a wig because he
“didn’t want to become Jefferson.”
“He was a brilliant
man who preached equality, but he didn’t practice it,” said LaNier, who is
descended from Jefferson and Hemmings. “He owned people. And now I’m here
because of it.”
The discussion around
the monument comes amid a national conversation in the wake of George Floyd’s
death about who should be honored with statues, memorials and
buildings named after him. A number of Confederate monuments and
statues honoring Christopher Columbus have been removed by either local
officials or protesters, but there is a trickier discussion around Founding
Fathers who were also slaveowners, including Jefferson and George Washington. A
visit by President Trump to Mount Rushmore, which features sculptures depicting
both Washington and Jefferson, drew attention to the South Dakota monument
that’s located on Lakota land.
A statue of Theodore
Roosevelt, the nation’s 26th president, is set to be removed from outside New
York City’s American Museum of Natural History, not as a commentary on
Roosevelt, but owing to how it depicts the two figures flanking him, a Native
American man and a Black man. The museum said it still planned to honor
Roosevelt, who they called a “a pioneering conservationist.”
“The world does not
need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the
person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice,” said
Theodore Roosevelt IV, age 77, a great-grandson and museum trustee. “The
composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s
legacy. It is time to move the statue and move forward.”
In recent weeks, Trump
has attempted to make protecting monuments a top issue, signing one executive order in an
attempt to further criminalize defacing or toppling them and another one to
create a national statue garden of
“the greatest Americans to ever live.” Trump has defended monuments to the Confederacy and
has balked at renaming U.S. military bases who honor Confederate officers.
Truscott has a
replacement in mind for the Jefferson Memorial, suggesting a Union Army veteran
and the woman whose portrait was selected to replace Andrew Jackson on the
twenty-dollar bill, until the Trump administration decided otherwise.
“It’s time to honor
one of our founding mothers, a woman who fought as an escaped slave to free
those still enslaved, who fought as an armed scout for the Union Army against
the Confederacy — a woman who helped to bring into being a more perfect union
after slavery, a process that continues to this day. In Jefferson’s place,
there should be another statue. It should be of Harriet Tubman,” Truscott said.
“To see a 19-foot-tall bronze statue of a Black woman, who was a slave and also
a patriot, in place of a white man who enslaved hundreds of men and women is
not erasing
Note From MU2: Jefferson's descendants want the memorial replaces, well isn't that nice? No, I really don't think anyone is doing the black community a favor by tearing down the reminders of their ancestor's enslavement. Perhaps I am wrong, but the words "out of sight, out of mind" keep on coming to focus in my thoughts when I think of everyone's rush to knock down all of these monuments. Why not put up a large placcard that explains the circumstances and let people know the truth that way? It's a teachable moment lost in my view to sweep it under the carpet.
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