“This week, it is Robert E. Lee and
this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it
George Washington [who owned slaves] next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
Trump said during a Trump Tower press conference, according to the New York Times.
That question was posed to former
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was the first African-American woman
to hold that office. She appeared on
“Fox & Friends” last week to talk about her newly released book “Democracy:
Stories from the Long Road to Freedom.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Rice, “As an African-American woman, do you
see yourself in this [U.S.] Constitution?
Do you think that when we look at nine of our first twelve presidents as
slave owners, should we start taking their statues down and say, ‘We’re embarrassed
by you?’”
Rice replied, “I am a firm believer in
‘keep your history before you.’ So, I
don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to have to look at those names and
recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them
to have a sense of their own history.” She
added, “When you start wiping out your history — sanitizing your history to
make you feel better — it’s a bad thing.”
“Let me just say one thing about our Constitution,”
Rice continued. “That Constitution
originally counted my ancestors as three-fifths of a man. And then in 1952, my father had trouble
registering to vote in Birmingham, Alabama. And then in 2005, I stood in the Ben Franklin
room — one of our founders — I took an oath of office to that same Constitution,
and it was administered by a Jewish woman Supreme Court justice. That’s the story of America.”
“The long road to freedom has indeed
been long. It’s been sometimes violent. It’s had many martyrs. But ultimately it has been Americans claiming
those institutions for themselves and expanding the definition of ‘We the
people,’” said Rice.
“Should we think less of George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson because they were slave
owners,” Kilmeade asked her. “Well, they
were people of their times,” Rice replied.
“I wish they had been like John Adams, who did not believe in slavery. I wish they had been like Alexander Hamilton,
who was an immigrant, by the way, a child of questionable parentage from the Caribbean.
I wish all of them had been like that. And Jefferson, in particular, a lot of
contradictions in Jefferson. But they
were people of their times.” Rice
concluded, “What we should celebrate is that from the Jeffersons and
Washingtons, the slave owners, look at where we are now.”
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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