Three days after New York City’s public design commission voted unanimously to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the city council chambers owing to the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime, President Joe Biden took a different tack.
Speaking at an event honoring the 10th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C., Biden chose to open his remarks by quoting Jefferson.
“Dr. King stands determined and brave, looking out over the promised land,” Biden said. “Across the Tidal Basin stands another giant of our history — Thomas Jefferson, whose words declared the very idea of America, that we are all created equal.”
STATUE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON TO BE REMOVED FROM NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL CHAMBERS
The contrast between the council’s actions and Biden’s reverent words may highlight yet another issue where Democratic centrists and progressives don’t see eye to eye.
While Biden went on to say that America has never fully lived up to Jefferson’s ideas, his speech contrasts sharply with those of Big Apple leaders who fought to remove Jefferson’s presence.
“Jefferson embodies some of the most shameful parts of our country’s history,” councilwoman Adrienne Adams said, according to the New York Times. As to the 188-year-old statue’s future, New York Assemblyman Charles Barron, who has tried to get it banished since 2001, added, “I don’t think it should go anywhere. I don’t think it should exist. … I think it should be put in storage or destroyed or whatever.”
Adams and Barron caucus with the city council’s Democrats. Jefferson has been revered as a Founding Father not only of the country but also of the Democratic Party.
While the debate over statues and monuments is unlikely to usurp the reconciliation bill in intraparty disputes anytime soon, it’s also an issue that doesn’t recede with the passage of legislation or a new election cycle.
“There’s no getting around the fact that Jefferson was a slave owner,” said D.C.-based Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “But one of the great ironies of Jefferson is that civil rights leaders, suffragettes, and just about anybody arguing for political equality have used the words that he wrote in the Declaration of Independence as a rallying cry.”
Bannon said the problem with Jefferson is that “we live in a black and white political environment — you’re either right or you’re wrong, and there aren’t any gray areas.”
Biden tried to establish some gray during a CNN town hall in Baltimore the same day as his King speech, saying it’s up to each locality to decide what to do with their own monuments. After mentioning Jefferson’s big idea that the United States was founded on, he finished by acknowledging that the country has never fully lived up to it and saying, “It depends. It depends.”
There is less ambiguity in the comments from Barron.
“[Biden] should be ashamed of himself, especially since black people put him in office,” said Barron, who says he’s an independent though he runs as a Democrat in elections. “For him to praise someone who raped us, enslaved us, and said we were inferior is a damned shame.”
There are many localities that may have to confront their relationship with Jefferson. Nationally, there are more than 50 K-12 schools named in his honor, along with 10 colleges and 30 cities and counties. Barron would like to see all of them renamed and is already working to find a new name for Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn.
Yet King himself often quoted Jefferson in speeches, and Jefferson sometimes advocated against slavery during his lifetime despite owning hundreds of enslaved people.
How do you reconcile the two? Bannon suggests a solution of having statues of Jefferson and King located near each other, which is the case on the national mall in Washington.
The national conversation about historical figures and slavery hasn’t escaped Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, which has been reevaluating how it presents Jefferson’s legacy in recent years and placing more emphasis on the lives of enslaved people.
Gary Sandling, Monticello’s vice president of strategy, chose not to wade directly into the public monuments issue, saying it’s up to individual communities to decide. He didn’t venture a guess what they will decide either.
“I don’t have any more of a crystal ball than anyone else does,” he said.
What is the answer when the community in question is the United States itself? Only time will tell the fate of the Jefferson Monument in Washington, along with the Jefferson statue inside the U.S. Capitol.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist in King’s home state of Georgia, said that despite the Jefferson statue’s removal, he should not be lumped in with figures such as Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson, who have also been the target of calls to rename roads and topple statues.
“While many people, especially Democrats, support the removal of Confederate monuments, there is less consensus about removing memorials to other historical figures who have complex, controversial, and contradictory relationships with the practice of equality,” she said. “Biden’s comments reflect that tension.”
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Gillespie added that the presence of D.C.’s MLK monument helps to “contextualize” older memorials like the one honoring Jefferson, even though the New York City Council opted to remove its statue rather than add another statue of a contemporary figure.
She doesn’t see the status of the Founding Fathers as a source of intraparty tension for Democrats in the near future given the fights over the Build Back Better plan. How the issue plays out in the future remains to be seen.
