Columbia University Students Cast Thomas Jefferson in KKK Hood

Bogus Times ^ | 4-22-17 | Kim Parkhurst

[BogusTimes]

Black students at Columbia University protested a campus statue of Thomas Jefferson last week by covering the statue, which stands in front of the journalism building, with a Ku Klux Klan hood and posing with signs disparaging Columbia University for celebrating the legacy of a man they regard as a white supremacist, hypocrite, rapist and a “symbol of violence against Black and brown bodies and their consciousness.”

The group protesting, Mobilized African Diaspora (MAD), compiled a statement of complaints on its web site condemning the 103-year-old statue of a Founding Father and principal author of the Declaraton of Independence, Thomas Jefferson himself, Columbia University and white people in general.

[nd76]

I live within 90 minutes of both Monticello and Montpelier (James Madison’s estate), and was lucky enough to have toured both of them a couple of weekends ago.

The historic trust associations that run both places refer to the slaves as “enslaved people”, and are re-creating buildings and items that they claim depict the way the slaves lived in the 18th and 19th centuries.

History is what it is; it shouldn’t merely “be written by the winners” or be “a pack of lies agreed upon”. All of it should be taught. The current group dictating history education in the USA would have been right at home editing the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia”.

The current group of leftists seeking to seize control of education in the country is using the “slaveowner” mantra to smear and efface all the good that Jefferson and Madison did.

For example, I long thought that Jefferson was an anti- Catholic bigot. It turns out that he was friendly with the Carrolls of Maryland, the famous Catholic family, and in fact was an advisor to Benjamin Latrobe and Bishop John Carroll on the construction of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Baltimore, the first Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States, constructed between 1806-1821. Jefferson was a flawed human being. He also was involved in magnificent undertakings.

If you are going to teach history, teach all of it.

As an aside, this is why the various Confederate memorials in every city and county seat in Virginia must be respected and protected. From a Catholic perspective, the Catholic church grew in the border states and had outposts in the south in places like Savannah, Mobile and New Orleans, and was hated with a passion in places like Massachusetts and New York. Pope Pius IX actually wrote a letter of support to Jefferson Davis.

[Ohioan]

Not sure why you felt a need to state that Jefferson was a "flawed" human. While all humans are almost certainly "flawed," I cannot think of any other American who was less flawed than Jefferson. I think it also clear that after General Washington, Jefferson was clearly the greatest American of his era. And the potential comparisons in that era stand head & shoulders above of any today.

There is no American in my lifetime who could be seriously compared to either.

The present obsession with slavery actually serves to demonstrate the confusion of the faux pundits involved. Some variant of slavery existed virtually everywhere on earth, before the advent of modern commerce, and financial methodology. It was a system suitable to early forms of agriculture and mining--and was the ongoing labor system in Biblical times. The "loyal and faithful" servants honored in ancient history were actually slaves.

[rockrr]

Thomas Jefferson was the Bubba Clinton of his era. Inconsistent, arbitrary, and self-contradictory, He would say or espouse one thing and then often go in the opposite direction. Sometimes he was brilliant and then he would go and do something boneheaded.

What I admire about him were his writings, many of which were truly inspired. What I dislike about him was his constant undercutting and betrayal of George Washington. What amuses me most about him was his befuddlement regarding slavery.