Favorite meme I've seen about the confederate statues goes like: "If someone kidnapped your child and sold them, where would you want us to put a statue of that person?"
The one for Thomas Jefferson could be "if someone did more for the freedom and prosperity of the world than anyone else ever, where would you like the statue?"
I bet his slaves would beg to differ....
"If". I would suggest, for freedom, that Abraham Lincoln did more to increase freedom by directly emancipating millions of slaves; for prosperity, I'd choose Albert Sabin, one of the vaccinators against polio. What, exactly, did Jefferson do that is comparable?
Wrote the declaration of independence and the US constitution, which created the first government based on the concept of unalienable human rights and was a great inspiration for later democracies.
You mean the same constitution that allowed slavery and counted slaves as 3/5 of a person?
I know this is a very tricky point so Ill use short words: people who have done great things can also have done bad things.
So yeah. It’s a great thing to create a “democracy” that was only democratic for White Males. Even women didn’t have the right to vote. Let’s just gloss over that. Why not? That’s what the entire US educational system does.
Did you know martin luther king was a plagiarist and a philanderer in addition to being a great civil rights leader? Should we bring down his statues?