A direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson wants the statue of the founding father at his memorial in Washington, D.C., to be removed and replaced with one honoring Harriet Tubman.
Lucian Truscott IV, Thomas Jefferson’s sixth-generation great-grandson, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times on Monday, calling for the Jefferson Memorial to be removed because of his family’s ties to slavery. He argued that Jefferson’s home in Monticello is the only memorial needed because it provides the full context of his ties to slavery and his forced relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves who bore six of his children.
“At Monticello, you will learn the history of Jefferson, the man who was president and wrote the Declaration of Independence, and you will learn the history of Jefferson, the slave owner. Monticello is an almost perfect memorial, because it reveals him with his moral failings in full, an imperfect man, a flawed founder,” Truscott wrote.
“That’s why we don’t need the Jefferson Memorial to celebrate him. He should not be honored with a bronze statue 19 feet tall, surrounded by a colonnade of white marble. The time to honor the slave-owning founders of our imperfect union is past. The ground, which should have moved long ago, has at last shifted beneath us,” he wrote.
Truscott argued that the Jefferson Memorial is not needed and that it should be replaced by a monument to Tubman, the liberator who used the underground railroad to free slaves.
“It’s time to honor one of our founding mothers, a woman who fought as an escaped slave to free those still enslaved, who fought as an armed scout for the Union Army against the Confederacy — a woman who helped to bring into being a more perfect union after slavery, a process that continues to this day. In Jefferson’s place, there should be another statue. It should be of Harriet Tubman,” he wrote.
“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,” he added.
Statues of Jefferson and other historical figures, such as George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, have been toppled by protesters or removed by government officials in recent weeks following the nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice that took place after the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after an officer knelt on his neck for several minutes during an arrest in Minneapolis.
