Thomas Jefferson a Symbol of White Supremacy?

Following the racial violence in Charlottesville earlier this month comes the claim that Thomas Jefferson is “an emblem of white supremacy.” 

This claim comes from students of the University of Virginia, a school that was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. 

This Monday, thousands of UVA students participated in the “March to Reclaim our Grounds” event hosted by the campus’s Minority Rights Coalition. 

Along with the event came a list of demands including:

• Mandatory “education on white supremacy, colonization, and slavery as they directly relate to Thomas Jefferson, the University, and the city of Charlottesville.”

• Racial quotas for faculty and admissions. 

• The renaming of buildings named after “white supremacists, eugenicists, or slaveholders.” 

Students claim the campus’s statue of Thomas Jefferson is “an emblem of white supremacy, and should be re-contextualized with a plaque to include that history.” Students have also asked UVA to declare the expansive campus lawn as a “residential space” – supposedly to keep people from staging demonstrations. 

The list of demands was signed by sixteen minority groups.

Author’s Note: This is a liberal university attempting to re-write history. Rather than learning about Thomas Jefferson as the man who wrote our Constitution, these individuals want future students to learn about Thomas Jefferson as a symbol of white supremacy and evil. 

As Ronald Reagan once said, “Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.”