'Hamilton' star Lin-Manuel Miranda fires back at cancel culture https://thehill.com/changing-americ...amilton-star-lin-manuel-miranda-fires-back-at
Thomas Jefferson statue boarded up and removed from New York City Hall | November 23, 2021 11:22 AM After almost two centuries of standing in New York's City Hall, an 884-pound statue of former President Thomas Jefferson was crammed in a wooden crate Monday and taken away. The city's mayoral commission voted to remove the effigy because the nation's third president owned slaves. It took a team of more than a dozen workers to remove the statue from its pedestal and lower it down the stairs on a pulley system, according to a report . The 187-year-old figure of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence was unceremoniously taken out through the back door. It is reportedly on a long-term loan to the New York Historical Society. The statue was banished from the chamber because it fails to represent contemporary values, said I. Daneek Miller, the co-chairman of the City Council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus. "Removing a monument without a public conversation about why it's happening is useless," said Erin Thompson, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "New Yorkers all need to talk about who we want to honor and why." "Moving this statue doesn't mean New Yorkers will forget who Thomas Jefferson was — but some of them might learn from the controversy that the man who wrote 'all men are created equal' owned over 600 of his fellow humans," Thompson said.
Thomas Jefferson was quite the enigma.... as a politician and political thinker he was brilliant but also a renassiance man.... as a human...well... it made no sense how he wrote one thing and lived his life another. I love going to Monticello, his home, to visit there and the guides always point out a copy of the Declaration of Independence was hanging in his study from his time and imagine his butler walking by that every day seeing "All men are created equal with inalienable rights etc..."
But could be read? I thought the first draft encompassed slaves? Though maybe it was white washing Jefferson
Sally Hemings father The children of Betty Hemings and John Wayles were three-quarters European in ancestry and fair-skinned.[3] According to the 1662 Virginia Slave Law, children born to enslaved mothers were considered enslaved people under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem: the enslaved status of a child followed that of the mother. Betty and her children, including Sally Hemings and all Sally's children, were legally slaves, even though the fathers were their white slave owners and the children were of majority-white ancestry.
Well I wondered about the reading but his personal servant who worked in the house was somewhat educated versus those outside the house so he probably could read some of it....not to mention he must have heard that phrase repeated hundreds of times and it being attributed to Jefferson.... while he was a slave there.
On his plantation the Hemmings family got a nicer shack and quarters versus the ones whose daughter he wasnt banging...