Twelve U.S. Presidents owned slaves, eight while in office.

This is tough to reconcile. How do liberty, freedom and equality coexist with enslavement? Perhaps it is not to be reconciled. To be sure, it is not to be excused. John Jay Chapman said, “There was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention …” Another axiom that was often tossed about was that (paraphrasing) slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears, you didn’t like it but you didn’t dare let it go. I call bullshit. What would have happened if someone would have shot the “coiled” snake or released the wolf?  

Certainly, Madison and probably the other Founders believed that if it excluded slavery, the Southern states wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. There would be no America. The American Revolution would be meaningless. So the Founders, so prescient on so many other principles and concepts and citizens rights, essentially looked the other way. They kicked the can down the road, and the can continues to clank along American roads today.

The thought that slavery might cause the dissolution of the Union terrorized Jefferson. He felt the Republican experiment was right and that any flaws in it would ultimately be righted by Republican principles. In other words, it will work itself out; let someone else figure out how. It’s hard to second-guess people like Washington, Madison and Jefferson. They believed the chance to form a democratic republic would not come again. Still, the hypocrisy is immense, their lips spoke freedom, but their actions, their founding blueprint spoke of one man owning another.

If the president has a house full of slaves how free can we be? The poster child for this contradiction is Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was one of the largest slave owners in Virginia. Slaves were beaten on his watch. Jefferson said, “Kings are the servants, not the proprietor of the people,” yet he was clearly the king of his household and a servant’s role was clear.

The father of his wife Martha had a second family with a mixed-race slave and one of the children of that arrangement, Sarah “Sally” Hemings, would become Jefferson’s de facto wife after Martha’s death. Sally and their children lived at Monticello, were used as domestic help and accompanied Jefferson to Europe when he was Secretary of State.Jefferson provided for them and took care of their needs, yet while they were not technically treated as slaves, they were not free. Jefferson thought it possible to be a slaveholder and still have enslaved people’s best interest at heart. He tried to be a “good master.” 

Everyone at Jefferson’s residence at Monticello, slave and free, was dependent on him and significant evidence indicates he considered them family, was in some ways generous and compassionate and cared about their welfare. But is that where we set the bar for our presidents? That they are good masters and rarely resort to the lash? To the end Jefferson seems to have clung to his position, that it was not in his power, perhaps not his responsibility, to end slavery. As regards slavery, Jefferson said: “Time which outlives all things will outlive this evil as well.”

The racial inequality that exists in America is but a reflection of colonial decisions. Were the Founding Fathers racists? Would it have been better for the so-called American experiment to be delayed, or abandoned altogether until the “land of the free” could actually be the land of the free? The Founders viewed America a works-in-progress, as something imperfect that could be refined and improved and tinkered with over time – for all time.

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If you read anything about race in America you’ll find descriptions of hate. Many, many graphic descriptions of hate. It physically makes you wince and you desperately grasp for something to explain it, to find where it comes from, to understand what could have happened to make one man consider himself so far superior to another as to beat, berate, enslave and kill that other man. I fear it’s in our national DNA. Hard-wired and role-modeled and passed down from 1776. Our presidents, Jefferson, ignored their intellect and endorsed the status quo. Even when the victims were their own flesh and blood, even when there was human compassion, even when every other part of their lives and their national vision was “enlightened,” somewhere in their being they considered nonwhites inferior. That mindset has been passed on.  

The license to hate blacks has turned into a license to hate anyone different from ourselves. If history tells us that it’s okay, maybe natural, to have an underclass, that there’s a racial pecking order, then it becomes second nature to apply that logic to creating other class divisions, maybe based on socioeconomics or country of origin or regionality or gender. So there’s an order to things – a top and a bottom, a first and last -and if you believe what you read in books, there are many among us who intend to maintain that order.

Slavery didn’t end with the Thirteenth Amendment, it just changed its shape. In fact, when compared to the violent, hate-filled reign of Jim Crow, the days when a simple slave could be owned by a president would take on the feel of the good ol’ days. Blacks are an “undercaste” – a lower caste of individual who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Said W.E.B. Du Bois on the advent of reconstruction and Jim Crow: “The slave went free and stood a brief moment in the sun and then moved back again toward slavery.” If slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears, Jim Crow turned the wolves loose – and they were white.

-In 1865-1866 500 whites were indicted in Texas for murdering blacks, none were convicted.
-Since 1900 there have been 3,500 recorded lynchings and only twelve convictions.
-In the 1930s there were only 100 black lawyers to represent nine million Southern blacks. In Alabama, there were one million blacks and just four black lawyers.

And while a black man had good cause to fear for his life virtually everywhere, in the American South he was a walking target. Mississippi didn’t ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995. Quite frankly, many Southern whites believed it was their right – a right their country had given them – to snuff out the rights of black people. Historian Nan Woodruff said, “Some of the meanest corners of the heart of darkness were found in the Delta during the first half of the twentieth century.” Between 1882 and 1926 Mississippi had 581 documented hangings.  

Jim Crow, like slavery, was institutionalized racism. Its prime intent was to maintain the undercaste status of blacks, but its residual effect is that it created a place, a chasm, where hatred can grow in our society. And that hate is wielded indiscriminately against the pigment in skin, against ideas that are new, intentions that are unfamiliar, beliefs that are nontraditional. Bill Moore was a white postman. He decided to walk through the South in 1963 to hand-deliver a letter advocating civil rights for blacks to the Governor of Mississippi. He was shot twice in the back of the head execution style along Highway 11 in Alabama.

Your view on race relations in this country, your view on whether there is progress being made toward equality, is 100 percent influenced by where you do the viewing from. On occasion, usually around MLK’s birthday or some civil rights milestone, you’ll hear poll results of a general nature like (my words), “Are there more bigots today than yesterday?” Whites will say fewer, blacks will say more. The view from the hill belies the reality in the valley.  

I’ve always thought it virtually impossible for a white man to have the slightest clue about a black man’s life, a black man’s circumstances, a black man’s struggle with racism. The same experience void exists between rich man/poor man. As such, I have sought out books that may provide a thin baseline for a remedial understanding of another man’s reality. The result has been humbling, but in no way surprising.  

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Blacks are through with segregation, now, henceforth and evermore. We are through with tokenism and gradualism, which lead only to donothingism and standstillism, we must move from the quicksands of social injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” He’s right, we must move, but we haven’t. Black remains segregated from white, rich remain separate from poor, despite the reality that some blacks are rich and many whites are poor. Separate cannot be equal, this has been proved.

How does racism live on? Racism, believing race determines your human value, is for sure politically incorrect, meaning most people can’t or won’t say it out loud, but why are so many still saying it under their breath? I think the answer is partly attributable to the original sin: that the colonists brought slavery with them to America and that a constitution was drafted that allowed slavery.  

Those roots gave hate permission – permission to view races with the eye of inequality, permission for one class to think it should be served by another, permission to build walls between countrymen. More people than we know, more people than imaginable, are still using that original version of that American playbook – the one where presidents owned slaves, etc. Turns out that slavery never went away, it just evolved into different concepts.  

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say? Maybe something like: “The American experiment will never be complete, it was always intended to be a living organism, keep working at it!” And maybe that’s noble, but the concept that a democratic republic would, at some point, naturally course correct, eventually, organically purge itself of evil poisons, was folly. I keep wondering about that wolf, the wolf that was slavery, the wolf that was hate. Maybe we should have let him go? Yep, he may have turned right around and ate somebody in 1776, and if so, after the wolf had had his fill, we would have shot him and that would have been that. But now 250 years later that wolf has turned into a wolf pack – big and ominous, and today that pack threatens to eat us all.