The Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinners are famous events for the state Democratic Party in Connecticut. However, as part of the backlash against historical figures who owned slaves, the NAACP demanded that both names be stripped away from the dinner and the state Democratic Party agreed.
Nick Balletto, the party’s first-year chairman, said that he hoped other states would follow suit and do “the right thing.” Some may disagree with that assessment.
First, I have been a long critic of Jackson who is legitimately blamed for the Trail of Tears and other atrocities against Native Americans. He is also viewed as the father of the patronage system. He also openly challenged the authority of the Supreme Court to restrain him. It has always astonished me that Democratic Party embraced such an abusive figure as Jackson. However, Jefferson is a founding father who is credited not only with the Declaration of Independence but key rights like those of religious freedoms.
Second, stripping away references to all slave owners would wipe out many if not most of the framers. Slavery was a tremendous evil at the time and those framers with slaves are legitimately criticized for calling for political and social rights while enslaving other human beings. They were flawed figures but they were also the creators of a system that allowed for not only the evolution of rights but the ultimate rejection of slavery.
Scot X. Esdaile, the head of Connecticut’s NAACP, insisted that only stripping away such names can heal the wounds of racism and that the move of the Democratic Party was “making the symbolic first step and striving to right the wrongs of the past . . . You can’t right all the wrongs, but I think it’s a symbolic gesture of our support for their party.”
Ironically, Jefferson was one of the most active in seeking to curtail slavery. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson originally sought to criticize England for forcing the slave trade on the colonies but it was taken out of the draft. In 1778, Jefferson led the effort to ban the importation of slaves into Virginia and as President fought against the slave trade. In 1784 Jefferson unsuccessfully proposed federal legislation banning slavery in the New Territories of the North and South after 1800. He wrote about the corrupting influence of slavery. In other words, his story is a complex one and captures a generation that was moving at least in part toward the emancipation of slaves.
What do you think?
Harriet Tubman replacing Jackson on U.S. currency would be a huge step in the right direction.
Most leaders and voters don’t acknowledge their complicity in evil when it’s happening in real time. For example today both Republicans and Democrats know that more than 80% of all Guantanamo detainees were completely innocent with absolutely no ties to terrorism and weren’t even near a live battlefield. Both parties allow private prison companies to demand “occupancy quotas” in their state prison systems in return for campaign donations. Both parties have used the Espionage Act to silence the free press and legal whistleblowers. Children are being held behind barbed-wire and facing a judge without an attorney in immigration detention camps.
Would that disqualify Bush and Obama from such name use in the future?
ninian
Lee inherited hundreds of slaves from his father in law. They were supposed to be set free but Lee kept them, kept them working, put some in jail for defying him, had some beaten, etc….
To Isaac
Lee’s wife inherited 63 slaves from her father
The Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln. Yet today it stands up for the Confederate Flag. Most Americans do not know that the Republican Party was the Party of Lincoln. Lincoln rolls over in his grave when these Southern Bigots who are now RepubliCons do the things that they do. The Democrat Party was the Party of the South during the Civil War and thereafter.
It was Lee Atwater who set forth The Southern Strategy whereby the Republican Party “went South”. They cater to the White Bigot. The Red States (Republican) are almost all in the Old South. The Northeastern states went Democrat whereas they used to be Republican. Places like Missoura are split down the middle like they were in the Civil War but the roles are reversed.
It is all coming to a theatre near you.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin all owned Slaves. George Washington owned 316 slaves.
Abraham Lincoln was politically attacked as an abolitionist, but he did not consider himself one; he did not call for the immediate end of slavery everywhere in the U.S. until the proposed 13th Amendment became part of his party platform for the 1864 election. In 1842, Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd, who was a daughter of a prominent slave-owning family from Kentucky. Emancipation, when it came, was a military policy.
On the other hand, Robert E. Lee never owned, nor inherited, Slaves – and yet fought for the South as a Virginian Patriot.
U.S. “freedom” is built on the foundations of commercial slavery.
If leading historical figures are to be axed for their exploitation of the trade in human trafficking then we can all sit back and wait and see who is next. I just have this feeling that George Washington will escape the hangman noose…… for the second time !
You know, I am waiting for the day when I can look down from Heaven, with my shiny little halo, say about 200 years in the future, and the whole country eats veggies and artificial veggie based meat tasting products, and all the people in that age are aghast at us all meat eating carnivores, and want to tear up all our gravestones and monuments, and dig us up and dump our corpses in the garbage somewhere.
Because we are going to look pretty primitive to them.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Reblogged this on Scoop Feed.
Bam Bam stole my answer. Well put, my friend.
The only reason I don’t go to the Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson dinner is the inclusion of LBJ! It is absurd to judge historic persons who formed this country with the views of present day mores and laws. The criterion should be did these individuals contribure substantially to the progress of our civilization. Since the US was the world leader in the anti-slavery movement until the Brits outlawed the trade, the fact that Jefferson and Jackson owned slaves needs to be seen in the context of their times. Their contributions to our progressive politics is incontestable Thus I am opposed to rewriting history and taking things out of context. Doing that is simply dishonest and a fraud.
I suggest folks read the book The Trail of Tears to get knowledge about what really happened. The death toll on that was only 218, and most of those were the result of using a contractor who was a Cherokee. The US Army had already relocated thousand of others with far less casualties. So our recent history of contractors killing US GIs is not an anomoly in our history.
We should just admit that we Americans aren’t perfect and don’t try to erase, ignore or whitewash history. It should be visible, warts and all.
I wouldn’t want to be part of any group that would do such a disrespectful thing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-unflattering-history-lesson/2015/02/19/3be9cb0c-b878-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html
Sort of reminiscent of the attempt to ban AP history by Oklahoma Republicans because it emphasizes what’s “bad” about our country.
“This week an Oklahoma legislative committee voted overwhelmingly to effectively ban the teaching of Advanced Placement U.S. history classes. The bill’s author, Rep. Dan Fisher (R), said that state funds shouldn’t be used to teach the course — which students can take to receive college credit — because he believes it emphasizes “what is bad about America” and characterizes the United States as a “nation of oppressors and exploiters.” Fisher’s proposal to replace the ready-made, nationally used, college-recognized AP curriculum — studied by hundreds of thousands of high school students each year — with a homegrown substitute would cost the state an estimated $3.8 million.”
A shout out to my peeps–Aridog and Squeeky. 🙂 Right back at ya!
@bams
Amen to what Ari said!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Bam bam [12.55 AM] … sometimes you just nail it perfectly. Good job.
As usual people want to focus on optics. Insanity. No one ever said the founding fathers or our presidents were perfect. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, there I typed them and I’m proud.
Are these the same people who caved on TPP?
“Such events seem to come closer and closer but do not occur, even when all the
conditions are ripe—until suddenly they do.”
Wiki
“Tipping Point” –
“Regime transitions belong to that paradoxical class of events which are inevitable but not predictable. Other examples are bank runs, currency inflations, strikes, migrations, riots, and revolutions. In retrospect, such events are explainable, even over-determined. In prospect, however, their timing and character are impossible to anticipate. Such events seem to come closer and closer but do not occur, even when all the conditions are ripe—until suddenly they do.[3]”
“Tipping point is not the only phrase from physics that has been in other fields as a metaphor for human behavior.”
“Critical mass from nuclear physics is another.”
Those who are shocked and dismayed by the antics of ISIS–the destruction of monuments and irreplaceable artifacts, the demolition of statues and historical sites, the attempt to purge society of all unfavorable traces from the past–need look no farther than our own Democratic party and its sad attempt to rewrite history by stripping names from our history. ISIS would be so proud.
“They were flawed figures but they were also the creators of a system that allowed for not only the evolution of rights but the ultimate rejection of slavery.
“… the evolution of rights…” excellent phrase and concept.
Reblogged this on Arlin Report.
Not many Founding Fathers left–perhaps, only John Adams. Will they now shred Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, in Connecticut?