The Maplewood Board of Education’s Shameful Snub of Thomas Jefferson
Citing slave ownership, N.J. district to change name of Jefferson school, read the heading of a small blurb in the 8/19/21 New Jersey Star-Ledger. As Chris Sheldon reports:
By this time next year, Jefferson Elementary School in Maplewood will have a new name as school district officials were looking to cut the school’s tie to one of America’s founding fathers due to his affiliation with slavery.
That Founding Father is, of course, Thomas Jefferson, the man who authored the Declaration of Independence, the document that declared the liberty equality of all men. That Declaration was the tip of a massive philosophical and moral revolution that would be the death knell of slavery in America and around the world.
The South Orange Maplewood Board of Education approved a resolution Monday to rename the school to one that will “ensure and model an inclusive, welcoming and respectful learning environment” by the 2022-23 school year.
A respectful learning environment? These board members don’t know the first thing about learning, education, or history, apparently. They don’t understand how history works and evolves.
History is an evolutionary process driven primarily by philosophy. Jefferson was instrumental in ending slavery by articulating the most anti-slavery ideas ever articulated as the philosophic foundation of a nation. The Maplewood school board may not get it, but the Abolitionists certainly did. So did the Confederate leaders. The Abolitionists embraced Jefferson. The Southern slavocracy rebelled against him. Said Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 4th of July speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,
You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country. [emphasis in original]
Douglass held up Jefferson’s words to call out the hypocrisy of American slavery. He did not repudiate Jefferson. Those words fueled his Abolitionist activism. He went on:
Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.
The “forces in operation,” Douglass understood, included “the great principles” that Jefferson articulated -- and that indeed guaranteed “the doom of slavery.”
Contrast Douglass with a leading political leader of the newly formed Confederacy. Said Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in his famous 1861 oration known as the Cornerstone Speech declaring the South’s repudiation of the foundational principle of the Declaration of Independence,
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." [my emphasis]
Unlike the Maplewood board, Stephens, like other pro-slavery thinkers, understood the power of Jefferson’s words and the danger they posed to the slave-holding South.
One need not forgive Jefferson’s “affiliation with slavery” to recognize Jefferson’s true place in history, that of the antithesis of slavery. Jefferson occupied a unique place in history. He sat at a major historic intersection--the intersection of the death throes of slavery and the ascendency of Enlightenment liberalism. He represented both the old that was on its way out, and the new that was on its way in. His slaveholding was hypocritical, but it represented the old. His leadership in the American Revolution represented the new -- the philosophical and moral revolution that was for the first time recognizing the equality and inalienable individual rights of all human beings regardless of color, origin, status, gender, or wealth. The signers of the Declaration, whatever their flaws and hypocrisies, engineered a tectonic shift under human history: They signed the death warrant for African slavery, and slavery everywhere.
That, not Jefferson’s slaveholding, is what we revere and celebrate in Thomas Jefferson. He left the world an enduring intellectual fuel for the march of liberty. He left the world a better place. This is why freedom and justice warriors like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther king Jr., and Harvey Milk called on Jefferson for support. It seems the Maplewood board’s definition of “inclusive” does not include some great Americans, or those millions of we ordinary Americans who revere them. If the South Orange Maplewood School Board were serious about its commitment to “ensure and model an inclusive, welcoming and respectful learning environment,” it would integrate the recommendations of the Open Letter to the National School Boards Association & Local School Boards by 1776 Unites, a nonpartisan and intellectually diverse black-led alliance of writers, educators, thinkers, and activists. The open letter urges adoption of its curricula that, among much more, calls on America’s schools to
confronts the realities of slavery and racism in American history while also recognizing them as betrayals of our founding’s highest principles. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson are celebrated in our history despite, not because of, their personal and political failings. The struggle of Americans to rise and realize our own values is part of our story—and always has been.
Maplewood’s action is not a repudiation of slavery. It is a repudiation of American ideals. It is a kowtow to ignorance, and a slap in the face to the memory of slaves. Somewhere, the ghost of Alexander H. Stephens is smiling down on the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education. Shame on the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education. It does not deserve to have the word “Education” attached to its heading.
Related Reading:
July 4, 1776: 'Words that Will Never Be Erased'
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
Nike Shamefully Turns it’s Back on Americanism
On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of
Another Reactionary’s Flawed Framing of American Ideals
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
1 comment:
The South Maplewood Board is a board of indoctrination, not of education.
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