A descendant of Thomas Jefferson on a necessary reckoning.
 | By John Guida Politics Editor, Opinion |
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“The time to honor the slave-owning founders of our imperfect union is past,” wrote Lucian K. Truscott IV in a recent Op-Ed. “The ground, which should have moved long ago, has at last shifted beneath us.” |
For Lucian, a journalist and a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, that shift should include taking down the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. |
The George Floyd protests have not just incited a reckoning with the criminal-justice system. They have unleashed a review and renewal of our national history. |
I’m an editor in Opinion, and I’ve thought a lot about what that renewal means for our country. Writers I’ve worked with have taken in and appraised the sweep of our history, from the legacy of Francis Drake in California and Woodrow Wilson at Princeton to the question of what new perspectives will shape our future. |
President Trump, in his speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, called this conversation “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” |
In a column written before the president’s remarks, Timothy Egan had a very different “merciless campaign” in mind. He wrote about Custer County, S.D., named for George Armstrong Custer, a “slayer” of “Native people.” Custer County is home to the Native American Rushmore — “a still unfinished carving of the Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse, 641 feet long and 563 feet high.” It is also less than 20 miles from Mount Rushmore, making the area an “American paradox in a grid of stark geology.” |
In such an “angry and fearful” country, Tim wondered, can we ever have a “shared narrative” again? |
That is our grueling but necessary challenge. As Erin Aubry Kaplan, a Times contributing writer, argued, “Recognizing that Black people matter as much as all other Americans is only acknowledging what’s always been true.” |
She noted what this might mean: “Being truly antiracist will require white people to be inconvenienced by new policies and practices, legal and social, that affect everything in everyone’s daily lives, from jobs to arts and publishing.” |
For Lucian, the American story is as intimate as family. And like families, nations are fluid. |
He has a candidate to replace his distant relative on the Jefferson Memorial: Harriet Tubman. To see “a Black woman, who was a slave and also a patriot, in place of a white man who enslaved hundreds of men and women is not erasing history,” he writes. “It’s telling the real history of America.” |
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