Thomas Jefferson:
Racist or Race Activist?

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the New River Valley, August 1, 2004, by Andrea Kelso, member of the UUC who has gone through the TJ District “Journey towards Wholeness” program.

Opening words

Each of us has a name
Given by God
And given by our parents

Each of us has a name
Given by our stature and our smile
And given by what we wear

Each of us has a name
Given by the mountains
And given by our walls

Each of us has a name
Given by the stars
And given by our neighbors

Each of us has a name
Given by his sins
And given by our longing

Each of us has a name
Given by our enemies
And given by our love

Each of us has a name
Given by our celebrations
And given by our work

Each of us has a name
Given by the seasons
And given by our blindness

Each of us has a name
Given by the sea
And given by our death

“Each Man Has a Name”
Zelda Mishkovsky, (as adapted by Marcia Falk,
in The Book of Blessings, New York: Harper Collins, 1996, p.106)

The Discussion

My presentation today is a story. It’s my story of awakening to the struggle against racism as a promise. This is your story too — a story about our district’s identity — and it’s my belief that our identity, absent an honest grappling with Jefferson’s racism, may only be a barrier to justice and equity in the UUA: nationally, regionally and congregationally.

When my husband and I came to Blacksburg in 1994, I believed myself fairly sophisticated on matters of race relations. After all, John and I both grew up in the area of Washington DC where race is a continual drama — DC being a district having no vote in our United States congress.

Our friend Glenda, had us to her place for an evening with her friends quite soon after our arrival here to the place she called “Black-less-burg.”

That night I was stunned stupid to confront statements criticizing Thomas Jefferson, who to that moment I’d regarded as the architect of a society that would eventually dismantle the institution of slavery. Who knew there was any reason at all to see TJ as anything but the glorious author of the American revolution?

I’ll be referring to Thomas Jefferson as “TJ” often through this discussion.

Since that evening, I’ve been haunted by an experience of African Americans having reason — both historical (more than three centuries) and current — to first approach my skin color not just with suspicion, but sometimes, with overt hatred. My history, lineage and identification with race on this continent, position me to be chronically alienated from potential friends of color. I’ll have always to strive for an antiracist world, in order ever to be seen as friend at first sight.

Around mid-1995, John and I discovered and joined this UU community (as spanking-new UUs,) and participated in various activities and efforts generated by this congregation.

Honestly, I forget having come to be known as having a passion for antiracism — possibly during discussions following the viewing of Lee Mun Wah’s “The Color of Fear,” and offering minimal leadership, with our then minister, Rev. Rudi Gelsey.

Soon thereafter, I was invited to apply to a team of antiracists from throughout this enormous Thomas Jefferson District. That team would become a District Antiracism Transformation Team or DARTT.

It turns out that TJ District has been in the forefront of UUA antiracism work, and enjoys quite a lot of respect nationally for that work.

Becoming a member of that DARTT launched a personal exploration of racism in my own life. So began my sincere and painful look at White Privilege — my whiteness, as my discovery fleshes out (so to speak) comprises my own lifelong blindness to all the ways what’s right in my life has been delivered to me on the backs of people of color. That blindness makes me feel now as if many points have melted from an already modest IQ.

Within this history of my own journey, are stacked the events that challenge our district name and identity. You see as John and I marched obliviously into this UU world, there was a district-wide conversation ending in a vote on whether to change this district’s name.

My ignorance, if blissful then, shames me now. I’d been numbed to, and/or deprived of the facts about TJ’s complicity related to slavery and race. I enjoyed a privileged prerogative to glance fleetingly at the literature describing the arguments, and concluded that the conversation was a tempest-teapot matter.

I apologize now, to say I opted out of that incredibly significant discourse and if my memory holds, I was indifferent to the outcome. Now, I’d give anything to change the history of my own participation back then!

Here’s the information I foolishly failed to take in:

Evolving from the Southern Neighbors Associate Alliance (a group of Unitarian women 1929 to 1939), then the Southern Neighbors Fellowship of Liberal Churches (both men and women in 1940), we became the Thomas Jefferson Conference in 1945 on leaving the Joseph Priestly Conference. [What if Harper’s Ferry and Charlottesville were geographically exchanged - perhaps the John Brown Conference?] In the late ‘50s TJ Conference became TJ Council and represented the entire southeast continent.

After the American Unitarian Association merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, the Thomas Jefferson District of the UUA formed in 1962. Throughout the civil rights era, until even now, there has persisted a question, “Can we not arrive at a more inclusive image that our district could be known by that fits with our diversity today?”

In 1993 the TJ District hosted that year’s General Assembly in Charlottesville, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of TJ’s birth. The Reverend Hope Johnson of the Community Church in NYC brought that GA to a momentary halt with protest statement during the first Plenary on that G.A. Friday:

Hear Hope Johnson’s words,

We, members of the African American Unitarian Universalist Ministers (AAUUM), and our many friends of differing racial and cultural backgrounds are outraged by, and strenuously protest the inclusion of events described as “The Most Famous Unitarian in the World” and the “Thomas Jefferson Birthday Ball” in this UUA General Assembly Program. We refuse to participate in these activities which reflect a profound lack of sensitivity and judgment, particularly in view of the UUA’s stated thrust this year toward racial and ethnic diversity. We urge all Unitarian Universalists to look at the total picture before lending your presence to the planned events.

Rev Johnson went on to instruct,

Please consider these elements:
“the Most Famous Unitarian in the World” as described for one of the GA events was:

• An unrepentant slave holder;
• Advocated the extermination of indigenous peoples in America;
• Had an enslaved consort, Sally Hemings, who bore his children;
• Refused to set free his slaves, many of whom were his own children.

This example of the selective creation of heroes and heroines within the UUA perpetuates continuing racial oppression and promotes neo-racism in our Association, and in this nation.

Thomas Jefferson’s role in the racial history of the United States is not one which African Americans, native Americans, or others victimized by the “founding fathers” wish to honor.

• Is his life style one that Unitarian Universalists should really celebrate?
  
• Must African Americans attend such events in rags and chains?

Needless to say, this event catalyzed painful controversy. A sincere and soul-searching dialogue was promoted within the TJ District, urged by then district president, Barbro Hansson, with the purpose of considering the meaning of the district name, and its effect on our faith community. Workshops titled, “What’s In A Name?” were facilitated at the TJ District Anti-Racism Conference, the TJ District Annual Meeting, and the Fall Leadership Conference all held in ‘94.

A Name-Change Committee coalesced in ‘95, presented findings to the district board in August that year, and materials were distributed to all congregations in preparation for a vote at the ‘97 Annual Meeting.

On April 26, 1997, the Annual Meeting of the TJ District convened at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte NC and the initiative to change the district’s name from TJ District to something that felt inclusive to all our district’s members failed: we needed a 2/3 majority vote to accomplish it. There were 175 UUs present with 121 delegates from 40 of the district’s 54 congregations in the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee and southeastern Georgia; the final tally was 75 in favor of changing the name to “Southeastern District” and 51 opposed.

We needed a vote of 84, and were short by six votes.

Then a motion passed to form a District Anti-racism Task Force which would be charged with continuing to study the issue of the name as well as how Unitarian Universalists in the District can best work to combat racism both within the denomination and in the larger community. Today the TJDARTT, is prepared to work with congregations to examine the question, yet perplexed somehow by the stymied ambivalence of this district in this matter of racial justice. That ambivalence is eerily similar to Jefferson’s in his day in my humble opinion. Is this a coincidence?

Since first hearing African American friends in Blacksburg disparage TJ’s impact on this nation, I’ve come a long way from my position of indifference on the subject. Now my head reels with black-white conversations about race, racism and the power of privilege.

Thomas Jefferson, by the way, was described on the PBS special “The Power Of An Illusion” as central to the matter of race as we understand it in America.

Paul Finkelman tells us that it’s

possible to make the argument that Thomas Jefferson is the first person to truly articulate a theory of race in the United States, and in effect, he has to do so. He has said in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal. Well, if in fact we’re all created equal, and if in fact we’re entitled to our liberty, then how can he possibly own 175 slaves, [closer to] 225 slaves at the peak of his slaveholding?

the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

The problem that they had to figure out is how can we promote liberty, freedom, democracy on the one hand, and a system of slavery and exploitation of peoples who are non-white on the other?

Colony by colony, new laws made slavery permanent and inheritable for black people. And for the first time the word “white,” rather than “Christian” or “Englishman” began appearing in colonial statutes.

Slavery became identified with Africans - blackness and slavery went together. That gave the white American the idea that Africans were a different kind of people.

So TJ asked the questions about what innate differences occurred to make black people black, white people white and red people red. Absent a coherent notion of genetics, science presumed to simply measure differences: sizes of skulls, lips, noses, buttocks, distances between the eyes, and so forth. Eventually the discipline of anthropology came up with the whole idea of race and crafted the use of a language of distinctions. Enter Louis Agassiz in 1850, and his discussions of race in “The Types of Mankind”; later in the 1920s the labels, Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid entered our language about race.

That institutional society invested the contrivance of a caucasoid race with superiority is both historic and current. Neoracism is a alive and well today.

If — and indeed I’m persuaded that TJ was wonderfully complicated, perhaps a renaissance man — but if we give him his due, he’ll receive cudos for brilliant work during his time. It’s appropriate I think though, to let Jefferson be Jefferson, without ignoring his duplicitous perspective that formulated ways to justify slavery in the context of proclaiming all men to be equal.

TJ’s horrible lot was a vicious internal struggle that no doubt consumed life interpersonally and politically. His awful struggle was apparently
far greater than his strength of character, since even at the time of his death he only saw fit to free a handful of slaves that were his own children.

Jefferson is popularly quoted on his reflections on this struggle:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances … Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, a denunciation of slavery, 1785 (others date 1782)

Letting Jefferson be Jefferson, we’re left with his failed struggle between remarkable wisdom and his humanity with clay feet. Political acuity bound with profoundest ambivalence stayed his efforts to legislate the emancipation of Virginia slaves once and for all. He sold us out — we in Virginia and in the nation suffer for that, despite his powerful timing and words of human equality.

Given a blessed second chance to participate in the debate over the district’s name back in ‘97, I’d have to ask Unitarian Universalists this: Do we really want to identify with TJ’s duplicity of emotional, psychological and philosophical formulations in these contemporary times when racism is alive and well? Because that duplicity is what’s conjured when I say to African American friends that our congregational district is called “Thomas Jefferson District.”

Are there other persons or symbols to which we can attach our district identity? Is there no way to articulate unequivocal solidarity with views of peace, justice and enlightened maturity consistent with our faith?

Identifying as we have with TJ, is a double-edged sword. We slice away at our antiracist intentions every time we say that name with so intimate an affinity with the character of TJ. The ambivalence projected by his epoch life’s work is integral to our cultural history, and so unavoidably informs our present reality as white Americans.
Naming our district gives us an opportunity to identify with “things hoped for and not yet seen.”

We are a faith community after all (not to be confused with an historical society.) Might we not actually carve an identity that describes our vision for a future that embodies MLK’s Beloved Community?

Leon Spencer, our incredible district now-past-president and DARTT-member, has suggested with gentle mischief that TJD be an acronym for “Towards Justice District.” First hearing him say that, I had a Eureka moment. Of course, the suggestion is elegant indeed!

In his parting message to the district (in the TJ Connection) he says, “It is my hope that we will grow a Unitarian Universalism where my grandchild will feel at home, a place where she can be supported, challenged, nurtured and encouraged to question.”

Listen. Dr. Spencer is talking about things hoped for and not yet seen. WE ARE NOT THERE YET. But, we desperately want to be ... and to be there without equivocation. So far, our name seems to bind us — no, enslave us — to TJ’s equivocations along the lines of race and human equality.

In her piece titled “Frozen Anticipation: the Intersection Between Race and Democracy,” Leslie Takahashi Morris says,

A tyrannical majority is a set majority indifferent or hostile to the needs of numerically smaller groups.

Takahashi Morris, our friend now from Charlottesville, has given a life’s blood over time toward the transformation of this district into a more perfect district — one that lives our UU principles of an effective democracy affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person and promoting peace and justice for all. She concludes in her article,

I shiver to think it may not come or if it comes it may not last. I know I have no choice but to keep on traveling. For it is, I believe, as Lani Guinier says: ‘After all, democracy takes place when the silenced find a voice and when we begin to listen to what they have to say.

(Guinier 1998, 272)

Read Leslie’s article in full at http://www.meadville.edu/morris_2_2.html.

Closing words

“Despite their universality, there is a great difference from one culture to another in how names are given. Among most preliterate peoples, names are determined according to very definite and specific rules. Generally, in cultures with a keen sense of ancestry, children get their names from the totems and family trees of their parents. In some cultures, names are taken from events which happened during the pregnancy of the mother or shortly after the birth of the child, and in others, names are divined through magic and incantation. In some cases, the name given at birth is only the first of several names a person will bear throughout life. When this happens, the new names are given either to mark important milestones in life or to ward off evil spirits by tricking them into thinking that the person with the old name has disappeared.”

H. Edward Deluzain, (essay, “Names and Personal Identity”)

As the last line of the song by the same name goes, “I write your name: PEACE” (“Peace,” by Sweet Honey in the Rock, on the CD, “Selections.”)

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Copyright 2004, Andrea Kelso; Commercial Duplication Prohibited

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