Recently, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, in part because of a little known verse that celebrates slavery. The national soul is being tested again.
We all know the paradox of Thomas Jefferson. Despite his claim that all humans are created equal, he held slaves himself and did not free them in his will. He referred to Native Americans as “merciless savages” who should be displaced from North America.
Jefferson’s Declaration, our national birth certificate, promises human equality. How could the man who cherished liberty write the following?
…the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. —Thomas Jefferson, 1821
Would you trade places, all else being equal?
Jefferson described slavery in America as someone having a wolf by the ears: You don’t like it but you don’t dare let it go. He saw that cotton, and hence slavery, was so well entrenched that the South would fight for it.
His choice came down to “justice on one hand and self-preservation on the other.” Like many others, he chose self-preservation.
Do blacks and whites still walk in different shoes? Would you, if you are a white person, trade places with a black person who has the same talents and abilities as you? If not, we haven’t achieved the Declaration and Jefferson’s vision remains sadly true.
Almost two centuries ago, in 1819, Missouri applied for statehood as a slave state. At the time equal numbers of slave and free states existed, but the addition of a slave would’ve upset that balance and tilted power in Congress to the slaveholding South. Missouri’s application was defeated in Congress.
The slaveholding South was not okay with this.
South Carolina threatened to secede. Northern leaders fashioned the Missouri Compromise. Missouri was admitted as a slave state, and Maine entered as a free state. This would retain the balance of power in Congress. And the Louisiana purchase would be divided into northern and southern areas with the southern area open to more slave states and the northern section closed.
Jefferson understood the Missouri Compromise didn’t go anywhere near the real problem but only sidestepped it.
Putting new wallpaper on a rotting wall
The issue, the real disease, is not the balance of slave states–that’s only the symptom. The core issue was, can slavery exist in a nation that says all humans are created equal?
Our leaders just kicked the can down the road.
Jefferson sensed that a civil war was coming. Our country was like the owner of a house whose walls were rotting with termites. One way to sell it was to put up new wallpaper and hope that the new owners don’t notice. The walls will look good, but in truth will eventually collapse.
The Missouri Compromise just covered a rotting wall and bequeathed the house to the next generation. The house collapsed in 1860, with Abe Lincoln’s election. “Wallpapering” still goes on.
3 pivotal moments in our times
We can name at least three defining moments in contemporary race relations.
Rodney King taped beating in 1991 and the 1992 Los Angeles riot. For years, blacks complained about the LA police department being racist and brutal. And then this was filmed. But LAPD officers were acquitted by an all-white jury. The ensuing riot was ghastly.
The O.J. Simpson verdict of “not guilty” of 1995. Black people leapt for joy and whites shook their heads in stunned dismay. This moment opens a window of understanding about our society. White Americans could not understand, believing Simpson’s guilt to be obvious. Since then polling has shown more blacks believe he was guilty than did 20 years ago. At the time, black Americans were outraged about Rodney King and Simpson’s guilt may have weighed less than their desire to see the LAPD defeated in the courts. The American legal system has not exactly been generous to African Americans.
Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Obama is the Jackie Robinson of politics and his election turns the page in America’s history of race relations. A seven-year-old black youngster right now knows nothing but a black president! She can look at the president and see herself. This is a sea change. But was the U.S. ready? Emails instantly began circulating with cartoons of President Obama swinging in a tree with a watermelon, and a “birther” campaign was launched to “prove” he was born abroad.
Has history sustained Jefferson’s pessimism?
Would Jefferson regard Black Lives Matter as a legitimate protest movement? Unlike Hamilton, Jefferson liked rebellions: The French Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. He once observed that “a little rebellion now and again is a good thing.” Rebellions by the people expose injustices that can then be remedied through corrective legislative action. Rebellions result in positive change, thought Jefferson.
So was Jefferson right that we cannot be under the same government? The History Dr likes to point out that seemingly contradictory truths often co-exist. For example, just because you dislike one candidate, does not make you automatically a supporter of his or her opponent. The truth is more grey than that.
Obama’s election was one step forward that Jefferson could not possibly have foreseen. Other African-Americans eight years ago could not foresee it in their lifetimes, yet it happened. The future will always delight, disappoint, surprise.
If this post was interesting to you and you’d like more, please consider staying up to date with The History Dr by joining our mailing list. You won’t miss any more posts or videos with our weekly email.