Clint Smith writes:

“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Thomas Jefferson,” I said to a group of about 70 middle schoolers in Memphis. Hands shot up across the auditorium. “What do we know about him?” I asked.

“He was the president!” one said.

“He had funny hair!” said another.

“He wrote the Constitution?” one remarked, half-asking, half-asserting.

I responded to each of their comments:

“Yes, he was our country’s third president.”

“That’s actually how many men wore their hair back then. Many men even wore wigs.”

“Close! He was the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence.”

Then I asked, “Did you know that Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of enslaved Black people?” Most of the students shook their heads. “What if I told you that some of those people he enslaved were his own children?” The students gasped.

Recently, I visited schools in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, all states where legislators have passed laws and implemented executive orders restricting the teaching of so-called critical race theory. I was on tour to promote the newly released young readers’ edition, co-written with Sonja Cherry-Paul, of my 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, which is about how slavery is remembered across America.

I began most of my school presentations with a similar exchange about Jefferson because, even today, millions of Americans have never been taught that the Founding Father was an enslaver, let alone that Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman, gave birth to at least six of Jefferson’s children (beginning when she was 16 and he was in his late 40s). Four of these children survived past childhood; Jefferson enslaved them until they were adults. Talking about this part of the American story with students is just as important as teaching them about Jefferson’s political accomplishments; to gloss over his moral inconsistencies would be to gloss over the moral inconsistencies of the country’s founding—and its present.

It can be hard for people to hear these things about Jefferson, I told the students; many Americans are frightened by the prospect of having to reconsider their long-held narratives about the country and their place in it. According to some of the docents I spoke with at Monticello while doing research for my book, many visitors to Jefferson’s Virginia-plantation home have balked at the site’s portrayal of Jefferson as an enslaver, accusing the museum of trying to be “politically correct,” “change history,” or “tear Jefferson down.”

But the more complex version of the story is not all negative. Jefferson did a lot of good for many people, even as he also did a lot of harm to many people. America itself has helped many millions of people, even as it has also enacted violence on many millions of people.

This duality made intuitive sense to the students. They understood that their country and its heroes, like all of us, aren’t perfect—that everyone makes mistakes, even if we don’t immediately understand them as such. What we do is try to learn from our mistakes to become better versions of ourselves.

“Doesn’t seem that hard,” an eighth grader in Memphis said, shrugging her shoulders. “Just say both things.” [Continue reading…]