Revising history.
Via Daily Mail:
A statue to Thomas Jefferson on the lawn of the University of Virginia was defaced with the words ‘racist’ and ‘rapist’ early on Friday morning, just before the start of celebrations marking the 275th anniversary of his birth.
The marble base of the Founding Father’s 1910 sitting sculpture was daubed in crudely-lettered red spray paint, which was quickly scrubbed out by officials at the school in Charlottesville.
Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. president and founder of UVA – is thought to have fathered six children with Sally Hemings, a woman who was enslaved on his plantation.
In public, Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery, describing it as a ‘hideous blot’ and a ‘moral depravity’, yet he enslaved more than 600 people over the course of his life.
At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was drafting a Virginia law prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans, and six years later suggested an ordinance that would outlaw slavery in the Northwest Territories.
Yet he always maintained that abolition could only come around as part of the democratic process, and was opposed by moves by the federal government to enact abolition.