The Hypocrisy Is Stifling^®

While Congress was adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were holding in bondage our “Founding Laborers™” in one of the most inhumane, cruel, degrading system of slavery in the history of the world.  Thomas Jefferson wrote lofty words that “all men are created equal” and “they are endowed by their Creator” with the “rights…[of] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Yet he and the other Founding Fathers bought and sold our African ancestors as if they were animals.

The Hypocrisy Is Stifling^®.

Even though Thomas Jefferson said that blacks were inferior to whites in body and mind, he repeatedly raped his enslaved Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his wife Martha, beginning when Sally was a teenager (16-years-old), and he fathered several children by Sally Hemings.  Like so many other enslavers, he enslaved some of his own children.

Please see The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a National Book Award Winner, by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, 2008.  This excellent, very well researched book provides invaluable information about the day-to-day life of some of our enslaved ancestors.  It tells about the close relationship of the enslaved and the enslaver in this family.  It reveals the interaction between white and black persons who are related because the white enslavers raped the black enslaved women.

Also please see Twelve Years A Slave, the narrative of Solomon Northrup, a citizen of New York, who was kidnapped in 1841 and returned to freedom in 1853.