This archive report was first published on 7 July 2020.
My Family's Complicated Legacy ¶
Visiting my grandparents in Virginia as a child, I often crossed the Potomac River on the 14th Street Bridge, gazing at the Jefferson Memorial standing off to the left, overlooking the Tidal Basin. Though it was just a short walk from the Smithsonian museums, I never visited the memorial. My family's history was already alive and well at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's ancestral home, where my great-aunts and great-grandmother would take us to play.
My family's connection to Jefferson was more than just a distant relative; we were his great-granddaughters. Born and raised just a few miles away at Edgehill, a family plantation, they treated Monticello like their own home. It was where our great-grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles were buried, and where one day, we were told, we would be buried too.
Today, Monticello is an almost perfect memorial to Jefferson, revealing his moral failings in full. A tour of the estate will show you the joinery and furniture built by Sally Hemings's brother, John Hemings, and displays of rebuilt cabins and barns where those enslaved lived and worked.
But the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is a different story. Described as a 'shrine to freedom,' it's anything but. The memorial honors a man who owned more than 600 slaves and had at least six children with one of them, Sally Hemings. It's a shrine to a man who wrote that 'all men are created equal' but never made those words come true.
It's time to take down the Jefferson Memorial and replace it with a statue of Harriet Tubman, a woman who fought as an escaped slave to free those still enslaved, and as an armed scout for the Union Army against the Confederacy. 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 history. It's telling the real history of America.
