Alphonzo Stein: Pondering the troubling legacy of President Thomas Jefferson

The following column was declined publication by the Columbia Spectator after I refused to soften my argument.

On the steps of Columbia University's Journalism School, hovering over passers-by stands a nine-foot bronze depiction of Thomas Jefferson. How does a statue of a self-professed white supremacist find a place at the most diverse university in the Ivy League? Two words: selective memory.

In 1914, when the Jefferson statue was erected, white supremacy was a commonly accepted fact. Fifty-four blacks were reported lynched in 1914. The following year, President Woodrow Wilson viewed a White House screening of Birth of a Nation, a film that triumphs the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and praised it as "history writ with lightning." In the moral climate of 1914, any controversy attached to the erection of a Jefferson statue at Columbia would probably be more informed by Jefferson's distaste for American cities than his legacy as a slave owner.

Jefferson's quotes, such as blacks "are inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind," would not have been at odds with the attitude of the university; in fact, Columbia College would not even begin recruiting black students until 1964. The fact that Jefferson fathered several black children with his slave, all of whom grew up as slaves and received no formal education (it was illegal to teach slaves to read) may not have even been viewed as contradictory to the spirit of education. None of this was surprising in 1914.

But what about today? In June of this year, Columbia President Lee Bollinger is quoted in an Op-Ed he wrote for The Wall Street Journal as saying, "we in higher education must do a better job of reaping more of the educational benefits we claim for diversity."

Yet the statue remains. The tuition of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans helps to maintain the immortalized form of one who states in Notes on the State of Virginia that blacks are "dull in imagination" and "in reason much inferior."

But one can hardly complain about Columbia University honoring a man who enslaved his own children without acknowledging the massive Jefferson national monument that celebrates Jefferson in the nation's capital. This monument all citizens pay to maintain.

Why do we as Americans, in our morally enlightened time of the 21st century, still honor those who participated in and extolled the virtues of a governmental system that humiliated and dehumanized millions of Americans?

Some would argue that it would be wasteful to negate Jefferson and Co.'s crowning achievements due to a moral oversight that was widely accepted at the time. It's strange how few make this argument with regards to Hitler in Germany.

Actually, that brings up an interesting point: How many statues of Hitler does one expect to see when visiting the Heidelberg? What about public monuments honoring Goebbels in Berlin? If we follow the popular strain of logic that historical figures should not be judged for what was morally accepted at the time, but for the cultural impact they exerted on the society, surely the Nazis had a sizeable impact on the German way of life. Since Germans elected Hitler, his ideology could not have been that out of touch with the German people. This logic, however, is unevenly applied.

Adolf Hitler is rightly seen as a mass murderer while former U.S. President Andrew "Indian Killer" Jackson, who was responsible for the deaths of half of the entire Cherokee population, is on every American twenty-dollar bill.

Ten years ago, at the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Leon Wieseltier wrote, "anybody who looks at these images of corpses and sees only Jews has a great moral problem." I would suggest that anyone who sees no problem in the practice of honoring Jefferson, Jackson and their ilk as "genius" pioneers of American freedom suffer from the very same problem that Wieseltier describes.

Unlike our nation, Columbia enjoys the benefit of having a president who has publicly committed himself to the task of purging inequality from the social fabric of the U.S. Honoring a man who refused to see non-whites as full-fledged humans contradicts President Bollinger's history of pursuing equality for all Americans. In August 2003, The Village Voice wrote that Jefferson's statue "is the perfect symbol for Columbia's admirably high goals and stumbling efforts to achieve them." As a former Columbia student, I would like to offer President Bollinger some friendly advice: as a university and as a nation let's start achieving the goal of equality by respecting the millions who lived and died without hope at the hands of Thomas Jefferson and others. Take the statue down.Alphonzo Stein is a student in the College of General Studies. His e-mail address is alphonzo@sas.upenn.edu.

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