| Episodes |
1) Presenting a scholarly face to the interpretation of him presented in the newly competed Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., works by Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, Julian Boyd, Adrienne Koch, and Bernard Mayo celebrated the "Apostle of Liberty." Taking their cues from the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, these writers portrayed Jefferson as a symbol of freedom, equality, progress, universal rights, Enlightenment science, and cultivated taste, as well as someone deeply disturbed by slavery.
Robert G. Parkinson 3
2) I find it hard to believe that Mr. Furnas really takes his major theme seriously. That these myths have persisted through the years and have come down to plague our generation is all too obvious, but it is utterly fantastic to put upon the thin shoulders of poor Harriet Beecher Stowe this whole burden of guilt. I have the feeling that Mr. Furnas, with a journalist's penchant of exploiting the news-worthy name, has foisted upon Mrs. Stowe more than her rightful share of culpability in the matter.
Arthur P. Davis 349
3) What really stuck out to me was Winthrop Jordan's comment, "evidently, women loomed as threats to masculinity, as dangerously powerful sexual aggressors" (464). The reason this statement stuck out was because it doesn't refer to a specific race; it seems to me that Jordan is referring to ALL women. Jordan seems to be less racist than most of the other historians we have read thus far, and I thought he brought up some new unique ideas and reactions to Jefferson's attitudes towards women in general, but particularly towards Sally.
Samantha Gerstein, Lehigh University
4) Before long, however, critics began to have doubts about the Apostle of Liberty. Questioning Jefferson's views and influence, historians Leonard Levy and Winthrop Jordan first challenged the postwar scholarly consensus in the 1960s, a burgeoning fight that -- "with the added question of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings" -- soon escaped the ivory tower and captured the public's attention in the 1970s and 1980s.
Robert G. Parkinson 4
5) But let us turn to Thomas Jefferson himself, and consider these books in another way. Consider the portrait established by Dumas Malone, who has been at it for more than a quarter of a century. This means among other things that Malone has known Jefferson intimately for a very long time, that Jefferson has stood the test, and that Malone's treatment of his friend is the treatment one gentleman accords to another. The picture is benign. It shows us the man of peace, generosity, and reason, concerned throughout his life with the values of rational inquiry, the happiness of his countrymen, and all the material and spiritual forms of human liberty. But there is, alas, a difficulty, especially if you know something about the author and have fallen under his charm: where are your defenses against the sheer seductiveness of all this? You have no independent position from which to view the man Jefferson in some other way except through a breach of hospitality, which is what it would amount to say, with the eyes of a skeptic. If your host literally cannot imagine Thomas Jefferson as other than all that is fine and best only in a gentleman but in the entire American tradition itself, how can you?
Eric L. McKitrick
6) Though miscegeny was an undeniable fact for plantation households in the south, it is interesting to me how quickly the historians are to make Jefferson the exception to this rule. Automatically, they give us the character defense, but I wouldn't underestimate a person's ability to surprise us.
Kristen Dalton, Lehigh University
7) Radical scholars and black power intellectuals contended that scholars in the Charlottesville-centered "Jefferson establishment" had ignored a significant section of the Virginian's less-than-heroic record, especially on racial issues […] In short, leftist critics maintained that what Americans thought they knew when they celebrated the Apostle of Liberty was actually the product of a dangerous exercise in cultural hegemony.
Robert G. Parkinson 4
8) Thomas Jefferson was known to have had an African mistress. According to Robert Beverley, a colonial leader, "Thomas Jefferson dreamed of the intermingling of blood as a public policy" (Steiner, The Vanishing White Man, pp. 185-186). Jefferson didn't just dream, he made his wishes come true with action as a personal policy.
Auset BaKhufu 7
9) "Treating people as animals often makes something rather like animals out of them. Under the conditions of slavery white women would probably have been just as [sexually] regardless." I really loved this quote from Goodbye to Uncle Tom for multiple reasons. First of all, we heard so much about the "biological" factors that make whites superior to blacks and coming straight from Jefferson's mouth as well. It is refreshing to put such ideas back into context: the white population made blacks this way, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The whites, especially men, molded the black women into pre-held stereotypes. I also think this quote is interesting because of the play on gender. Sally Hemings gets bashed for being "a slut as common as the pavement," and Furnas talks about black women and their promiscuity. The white men who sleep with their slaves are never questioned about their actions; it is only the black slaves who get called names. This quote states that the black female population is treated like animals. Therefore, it's hard to keep the black females accountable for their actions. It's actually the white men who are more in control of the situation and who have the upbringing to make the better decisions.
Elizabeth Guzzo, Lehigh University
10) Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, segregationists vigorously proclaimed Thomas Jefferson the patron saint of white supremacy and states' rights. Defenders of Jim Crow turned to Jefferson as a figure of paramount authority who gave their embattled culture legitimacy and respectability. In their estimation, close examination of Jefferson's "true" views and fundamental principles revealed the founding father to be in accord with white reactionaries in their massive resistance to the expansion of civil rights.
Robert G. Parkinson 4
11) But let us turn to Thomas Jefferson himself, and consider these books in another way. Consider the portrait established by Dumas Malone, who has been at it for more than a quarter of a century. This means among other things that Malone has known Jefferson intimately for a very long time, that Jefferson has stood the test, and that Malone's treatment of his friend is the treatment one gentleman accords to another. The picture is benign. It shows us the man of peace, generosity, and reason, concerned throughout his life with the values of rational inquiry, the happiness of his countrymen, and all the material and spiritual forms of human liberty. But there is, alas, a difficulty, especially if you know something about the author and have fallen under his charm: where are your defenses against the sheer seductiveness of all this? You have no independent position from which to view the man Jefferson in some other way except through a breach of hospitality, which is what it would amount to say, with the eyes of a skeptic. If your host literally cannot imagine Thomas Jefferson as other than all that is fine and best only in a gentleman but in the entire American tradition itself, how can you?
Eric L. McKitrick
12) What has intrigued me most in reading all these various articles is the extreme diversity found in the pieces that accept the story of Sally Hemings and attempt to "revive" the scandal. I was struck by how different all of the articles are in their approach to the story -- some make passing reference to Jefferson, some write many pages only about him, some are full of contempt, and some are just plain interested in the story. I thought this posed an interesting contrast to the defense of the historians, who all seem to rely on the monotonous and consistent crutch of their "character defense." It feels like the historians attempting to defend Jefferson have this one scripted story that they are forced to stick to because it's the only thing they have going for them -- almost like a fabricated alibi in a trial. What I also find specifically interesting about the diversity found among those "reviving the story" is that it illustrates the fact that these people don't have any unanimous "motive" to insist that the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson existed; there is no explicitly obvious advantage for these people that are simply referencing or reporting on it. For instance, both the stories in Ebony and the Journal of Negro History simply seem to be referencing the affair and their descendents as a human interest story -- something they found to be noteworthy and of interest to others. Someone like Malcom X, on the other hand, considers the relationship between TJ and SH as evidence of the abuse inflicted on African-Americans by whites and as a means of debunking the reverence many people felt for Jefferson or similar white leaders. Ultimately, it seems to me as though the fact that none of these people have a unanimous or even selfish, advantageous reason to believe in the affair bolsters each of their individual beliefs that it happened. I feel as though they have little motive to propagate it if they didn't sincerely believe it to be true. Those defending the story, on the other hand, weaken the validity of their argument by all unanimously relying on the crutch of the character defense. It quickly starts to sound trite, scripted, and overdone, in my opinion. After reading all these articles, I am definitely more inclined to believe that the affair really did happen.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
13) Avoiding racial questions entirely, [James] Kilpatrick looked to tie Jefferson to the South's crusade of "interposition": a constitutional argument based on the compact theory of the Constitution, whereby the states, in voluntarily agreeing to create a federal government, still retained the right to "interpose" their sovereignty between the federal government and the people.
Robert G. Parkinson 8
14) To speak, as is so often done, of two "races" in the United States is to indulge in very loose talk, as loose as if one were to see a number of horses of different colors, some of which are white, and then speak of them as two "races" of horses, the white ones being one "race," and all the others the other "race." Similarity of education and national habits, acquired sometimes over centuries, are what make a people, not the color of the skin. If that were so, the brunette white, the rufous white, and the blond white, would logically be of different races. What we have in the United States, to speak and think accurately, is an American people of a vast variety of shades which blend imperceptibly from black to white, or white to black -- a people with a certain national psychology, which makes its members, when seen abroad, easily distinguishable as American.
J.A. Rogers, Sex and Race
15) What particularly stood out to me was not necessarily what Adair did say, but what he didn't. At one point he self-righteously says "the professional historian is taught to be extremely skeptical of any purported episode in a man's career that completely contradicts the whole tenor of his life and that requires belief in a total reversal of character" (181). What he fails to mention is that Jefferson's political life is already called into question because of the racist content in Notes on the State of Virginia. To backtrack a little, Jefferson says all men are created equal yet goes on at length to discuss the black race's shortcomings and general inferiority. It's interesting that Adair neglects to bring this up, because this would, in effect, further authenticate the argument that Jefferson did not have an affair with a slave. Clearly he's just playing the character card, because otherwise he would have mentioned this.
Samantha Feinberg, Lehigh University
16) Another significant book that plays up Jefferson's racism is Carleton Putam's 1961 Race and Reason: A Yankee View. One contemporary observer ranked Putnam's book as "probably the most popular pro-segregation book" since Black Monday and Herman Talmadge's You and Segregation. So highly regarded was Race and Reason that Gov. Ross Barnett proclaimed 26 October 1961 "Race and Reason Day" in Mississippi. Legislators in Louisiana found the book compelling enough to pass a resolution ordering "selected mature students" to study the book in state high schools.
Robert G. Parkinson 22
17) Thomas Jefferson seems to have had a particular fondness for dark feminine flesh.
J.A. Rogers, Sex and Race
18) I think it is really crazy when we think about how Jefferson's presence is still very much alive in today's culture. Before the Super Bowl, different Americans read his words with pride. The reading conveyed a message of patriotism and unity among different areas, races, and groups of people. It is ironic that there were black people reading his words with pride, when Jefferson also wrote such racist comments about African Americans. I really didn't know his opinions until beginning this research, and so I wonder if the people doing the promo for the Super Bowl realized them. I also wonder if their willingness to read his words would change.
Elizabeth Guzzo, Lehigh University
19) Nathaniel Weyl's The Negro in American Civilization (1963) also follows established conventions. Weyl went to even greater lengths than either Brady or Putnam to present the anti-integration image of Jefferson. He devotes an entire chapter to correct the accepted version of Jefferson's "attitude toward slavery and the Negro," which he argues had been "systematically misrepresented." Using what had by 1963 become predictable language, Weyl argues that Jefferson had been "falsely depicted as an egalitarian, as a friend of the Negro and as a crusader against slavery."
Robert G. Parkinson 22
20) From research collected, it has been determined that Jefferson had affairs with at least three married women, which is engaging in illegal sexual intercourse. He also had children with his Black mistress (a slave/political prisoner named Sally Hemmings [sic]) and other African women on his plantation. Some of his mulatto children were sold as slaves, which means that Jefferson also engaged in sexual intercourse for pay. The word that describes the "actions of Thomas Jefferson" is "whore" (Webster's Dictionary, Second Edition Deluxe, Simon and Schuster publishers, 1955 & 1983; The American Heritage Dictionary, Dell Publishing Co., Inc., N.Y., 1976. See any well published dictionary). Look it up. Who has ever said that a whore could, should, or would only be attributed to a woman?
Auset BaKhufu 8
21) I think it is important to make mention of the parts of Adair's piece that show Jefferson as the victim. I was surprised and interested to see that Adair put so much weight on proving Sally Hemings to be a woman looking to further her own reputation and also a liar who falsified information. . . . People were so unwilling to believe that Jefferson could have done something like this that Sally was automatically thrown under the microscope.
Samantha Christal, Lehigh University
22) The editors' interposition campaign quickly gained powerful political friends among those who also had searched desperately for a respectable way of resisting the Brown ruling. Among these supporters were the collective bodies of most southern state legislatures. . . . Thanks in part to the historical precedent set by Jefferson, the South found common ground on which to defy the desegregation order.
Robert G. Parkinson 11
23) Finally, there is only one race -- the human race. Most men will live like brothers when some particular exploiting interest does not teach them to hate one another. White and black, as I have shown in this book, never really had a chance to be friends from the start. The Virginia slaveholders taught them to hate one another -- a hate that was crystallized into law, all for the benefit of the masters, who waxed fat for a while but finally lost all. Crime, we are told, does not pay. Well, neither does it pay when made into law by a powerful exploiting group. The doctrine of racial superiority as it now exists in Germany and the United States is the insanity of the many for the gain of a few. Now is the time while this most distressing war is on to wipe off the books those laws that make one group of American citizens the enemies of another group. Jim Crow laws have brought only evil in the past; they can bring only evil for the future. Let us start with a clean slate and give future generations a chance.
J.A. Rogers, Sex and Race
24) I began thinking about Jefferson's silence and how that affected Sally if there was a relationship. I think because of his political standing, if Jefferson were to say anything publicly, he would have denied the relationship regardless of the truth. By not saying anything could he be preserving her dignity and saving her from being hurt? If he were to deny his love for her and agree with the public in viewing her as sub-human wouldn't that be the cruel thing to do in a relationship? Perhaps his silence was a sign of his affection?
Elaina Kelly, Lehigh University
25) In short, during the 1950s, two distinct images of Thomas Jefferson developed in Virginia and the South. One, the academy's version, enshrined in the Jefferson Memorial, sketched the founded father in heroic lines; he was for them ultimately the author of "all men are created equal," a visionary who, even if he failed in his own life, embodied the nation's greatest potential. . . . But another image of Jefferson was also widely invoked throughout the South in the 1950s. . . . Thomas Jefferson, the Dixiecrats and massive resisters complained, was not a supporter of racial equality, universal rights, or energetic government. . . . Jefferson so hated judicial tyranny and "big government," James J. Kilpatrick and others contended, that he provided them with a constitutional method of defeating the Brown decision, offering infallible historical authority on the "transcendent issue" of states' rights. Moreover, Jefferson certainly meant "all white men are created equal" in the nation's founding document; any interpretation that viewed Jefferson as a promoter of racial equality was a dangerous and false corruption, according to the segregationists.
Robert G. Parkinson 30
26) Jefferson had affairs with many African slaveheld, politically imprisoned, women. These affairs took place before and after the death of his wife. She begged him to stop his carousing, but to no avail.
Auset BaKhufu 21
27) In Peterson I found a defense of Jefferson that doesn't fit into the three categories we have talked about in class: the character defense, the other man defense, and the victim syndrome defense. The "miscegenation legend" arose from people making too much of Jefferson's personal habits: "His wife's early death, his brief affair with Mrs. Walker, his great interest in Negroes generally along with his particular kindness to some of his slaves, and items of a similar nature" (Peterson 187). I was trying to think of what sort of a historian defense we might call this approach to discrediting the story, and I thought one good name could be the "slippery slope" defense. Because Jefferson's wife died early on, because he was kind to his slaves, because he took an interest in his slaves, because sally might've been in Paris at the same time as him, etc., they MUST HAVE HAD some sort of relationship resulting in the children mentioned. Peterson is pointing out this "slippery slope" approach is used by the African Americans in their rumblings, and saying this is one of the reasons we must discredit the story itself. We have a bunch of pieces of the puzzle but nothing large enough, so how can we make such a claim?! I thought this defense strategy was particularly interesting.
Kimbrilee Weber, Lehigh University
28) Described as the "metaphysician of the master racists," Mississippi judge Tom Brady needed only six weeks after the Brown decision to produce an incredibly influential ninety-page booklet entitled Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation . . . America Has its Choice. This tract, which, in the words of one commentator, contained "the seeds of nearly all the major programs and philosophies that have been adopted by segregationist organizations since 1954," became the semi-official Bible of the Citizens' Councils. With the fame that accompanied Black Monday, Brady, who would be appointed to the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1963, quickly became known as "the godfather" of the segregationist movement.
Robert G. Parkinson 21
29) What does it all add up to? Jefferson's hatred of slavery, yet his inability to imagine emancipated blacks as responsible citizens of Virginia. A picture of Europe as the sinkhole of vice, yet surroundings at home that were anything but arcadian. And a touch of that element one finds in the brooding mentality of a celibate Irish clergy holding the lid down in the parish. Here, at any rate, is something that ranges well beyond the putative private sex life of Thomas Jefferson. It is the psychosexual dilemma of an entire society regarding slavery, reflected in that undergone by the most eminent citizen of Virginia and one of the most enlightened men of his time.
Eric L. McKitrick
30) Graham says it best -- "any woman who, willing or unwilling, held the close interest of Thomas Jefferson for at least 10 years, and probably well more than twice that time, was no casual light o' love" (101).
Stephanie DeLuca, Lehigh University
31) In some cases, especially in the whistle-blowing campaign against the Tidal Basin memorial, their critique of the liberal uses of Thomas Jefferson was grounded in fact. What made the segregationists' campaign formidable was that their argument could not be taken lightly. . . . In spite of its penchant for polemic, the segregationist recruitment of Jefferson proved a powerful and convincing campaign.
Robert G. Parkinson 27
32) Two years after his death, the beautiful 53 (some say 57) year old Hemmings [sic] was auctioned off as one of his Monticello possessions for a mere $50.
Auset BaKhufu 18
33) What is so interesting is the way Adair uses Jefferson's character to justify his innocence. Here we are, many years later, and historians like Adair are using Jefferson's "amazing character" to justify him. How do they know? Adair is acting as if he knew Jefferson's "honorable" character personally. What we have been calling the "character defense" would be better called the "amazing character defense."
Abigail Harris-Shea, Lehigh University
34) According to southern extremists, the memorial's designers purposely twisted Jefferson's "true views" through the manipulation of a punctuation mark. Specifically, segregationists directed their anger at the use of a period where Jefferson had originally placed a semi-colon. In his unfinished Autobiography, Jefferson commented that "nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than these people are to be free." This is the phrasing that is included in the memorial panel. Yet, as southern conservatives correctly argued, the sentence did not end there. The remainder of the thought repudiates any notion of integration and equality: "nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government." Outrage over the apparent "distortion" of Jefferson's immortal words seethed throughout segregationist literature.
Robert G. Parkinson 20
35) Thomas Jefferson, with Black blood running through his veins, was a man who apparently liked Africanness for his own reasons whether those reasons be genetics, love or lust. He is said to have fathered several mulatto children. One of his most important and well-known African mistresses was one of his slaves by the name of Sally Hemmings [sic].
Auset BaKhufu 15
36) Perhaps it's my appreciation of emotional appeal and voice that Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel allows Sally, but I can't let go of a line in Graham's piece that also touches on Sally's voice. It reads, "Sally was 53 years old when Jefferson died. From this moment, she disappears from history" (98). I think I've just figured out why I've been trying to make sense of my desperation to believe in Sally and Jefferson's loving relationship. Sally had been muted for so long. She was denied the right to speak. In B. Chase-Riboud's novel, she finds the words I'd been struggling for: "She had been raped of the only thing a slave possessed: her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history" (53). By interrogating her family and analyzing all of the words other than her own, we are denying her right of mind, feeling and history. Hasn't she been through enough?
Stephanie DeLuca, Lehigh University
37) When faced with the imminent destruction of the pervasive if rickety culture of segregation, southern whites needed all the allies they could enlist. Therefore, if an American hero [Jefferson] had written anything that could be seen as useful, it was fair play in a game with enormously high cultural stakes.
Robert G. Parkinson 26-27
38) For me the most impressive section of the work [Furnas's] is that which deals with slavery. In it the author has given the most objective and detailed account of the "peculiar institution" I have ever read. Made up of innumerable quotations from both primary sources and classical works on the subject, it is a documented statement which ought to destroy once and for all those romantic, magnolia-scented myths concerning plantation life which certain Southerners have used for so long in defense of that institution. Although Mr. Furnas, as he does throughout the work, attempts to give both sides of the question, we still leave this section with the feeling that American slavery, in the final analysis, was one of the most bestial and degrading systems ever imposed by one group upon another; we leave it appalled at the depths of depravity to which humanity is capable of falling.
Arthur P. Davis 350
39) Graham's mentioning of Mrs. Jefferson's wrought iron bell that Sally answered to for months, perhaps years, is worthwhile to think about: "Jefferson, to mark appreciation of the services rendered to his wife, presented to each of her attendants some token of gratitude. To Sally was given the intriguing little bell at whose call she had so often come running" (90). Of course, Jefferson had given each of his wife's attendants a little gift -- so the gift-giving was not so much to honor Sally as it was to honor his wife. However, Sally passed down that bell to her ancestors for one hundred and seventy years. Who does this honor? Mrs. Jefferson? Mr. Jefferson? Her commitment?
Stephanie DeLuca, Lehigh University
40) A much-circulated quotation from Jefferson's Autobiography is among those immortalized in the four panels that surround the central statue inside the Jefferson Memorial. Described as "one of the most glaring examples of deliberate pro-Negro distortions of the truth," the disclosure of this "liberal lie" became a touchstone of the segregationist racial argument.
Robert G. Parkinson 20
41) Knowing of Jefferson's sexual prowess, James Madison offered Jefferson his wife in return for political favors. Jefferson, being the dutiful gentleman, took Madison up on his offer and had a mutual seduction session (or more) with Madison's very well-endowed 39 year old wife. She was the same age as Sally Hemmings [sic], so old Jefferson was probably just looking for a little white action here connecting with his other Self.
Auset BaKhufu 26
42) Sally is not only silent, but she is made a mockery of. The Graham article only mentions Sally as simply a concubine and a piece of evidence proving that Jefferson had Negro grandchildren. Even after Jefferson is dead and the scandal resurfaces, where is Sally's voice? She is only used as proof to try to determine more about the scandal. She is simply the supporting role to the main character, Jefferson.
Abigail Harris-Shea, Lehigh University
43) Although the interposition campaign and the southern indictment of the Warren Court were widely covered in national newspapers throughout the 1950's, the expositions of Jefferson's attitude toward race were mainly featured in avowedly segregationist newspapers and book-length polemical tracts. . . . Race was of course the central topic throughout segregationist propaganda, but unlike the doctrine of interposition and judicial restraint, it was not offered up for general discussion.
Robert G. Parkinson 21
44) In the face of increasing hostility toward racial injustice, southerners in the postwar decade watched as civil rights grew to become a major political issue, while their traditional friends in the federal government quickly melted away. . . . Returning to the period venerated by Americans of all regions, segregationists turned to James Madison, and, more prominently, Thomas Jefferson, to form the core of their defense. In doing so, they focused on three of issues of Jefferson's legacy that best suited their needs: his passionate exposition of states' rights in the Kentucky Resolutions, his fulminations against the centralizing influences of the Supreme Court, and, less publicly, his famous inegalitarian views of blacks in Notes on the State of Virginia.
Robert G. Parkinson 6
45) I first encountered the story of Jefferson and Hemings in an old copy of Ebony magazine, dated 1954, and entitled "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren," widely discussed in Mr. Coombie Carroll's barbershop in Keyser, West Virginia.
Henry Louis Gates
46) In the 1950s, there were two conflicting images of Jefferson, both largely with origins in Virginia -- one championed in Richmond, the other in Charlottesville. Both of these camps, however, believed in good faith that they had "captured" the "real" Jefferson.
Robert G. Parkinson 6
47) He [Jefferson] was their [segregationists] savior -- a Southern slaveholder who prized small government and hated judicial tyranny -- and not the hero portrayed by scholars and politicians as an internationalist New Deal liberal.
Robert G. Parkinson 5
48) It is truly ridiculous how outlandish Douglass Adair's ideas about the alleged relationship between Peter Carr and Sally Hemings become near the end of his essay. His accusations seem to spin wildly out of control, transforming the affair into a near soap opera just to fit his need for establishing a plausible defense for Jefferson. Although his proposed scenario may have been what happened at Monticello, there is no objective evidence to support this. Adair's claim has no more weight than any other equally provocative claim might and, therefore, he has no right to deceive his readers and equate his theory as "empirical fact" in the manner that he does. Furthermore, since the relationship is not even a proven fact, it is impossible for him to make the assumptions he does about the nature of the relationship. Adair does not cite any sources but continually makes sweeping characterizations about what he calls the "genuine love match," particularly Sally's motivations behind naming Jefferson the father of her children instead of Carr. So little is known about the elusive Sally Hemings, how could Adair so definitely affirm this intimate detail of the relationship? He simply has no basis to do so.
Jennifer Markham, Lehigh University
49) Influential as it was, the interposition crusade was only one of three ways southern conservatives deployed the image of Jefferson to protect the culture of segregation. In a second, which complemented the interposition connection, segregationists also invoked the name and politics of Jefferson in their virulent indictments of the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Earl Warren. Jefferson's retirement letters that warned against the Court's centralizing tendencies made him a prophet against judicial tyranny and a perfect authority for segregationists to invoke.
Robert G. Parkinson 15
50) Thanks in part to [James] Kilpatrick and Jefferson, southern whites felt as if they had successfully staved off what to them seemed a serious cultural crisis [school integration]. The past had rescued the present yet again, or so it seemed. This false sense of security and hope lasted until a heretofore-silent President Eisenhower decided to send federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Central High School. The Little Rock crisis proved to be a fatal blow to interposition and to the South's confidence that it could legally and "respectably" escape integration.
Robert G. Parkinson 15
51) Fashioning himself a twentieth-century John C. Calhoun, the Oklahoma-born editor [James Kilpatrick] argued that the South's predicament was foretold by the founding fathers. In a role that segregationists repeatedly cast him throughout the 1950s, Jefferson became for Kilpatrick a clairvoyant.
Robert G. Parkinson 9
52) A third connection, one that held portentous implications for the way future commentators would view Jefferson, focused on his racial views. Making a less public linkage, but one no less enthusiastic than that tying Jefferson to interposition and judicial tyranny, southern extremists found plenty of space to reveal the founder as a white supremacist.
Robert G. Parkinson 17
53) Segregationists also took pride in publicly expressing Jefferson's "true views" on the inferiority of blacks and disclosing the evil liberal "secret" that they argued lay behind a deliberately incomplete inscription at the sacred Jefferson Memorial. These sensational revelations constituted the ugly and disturbing side of the segregationist recruitment of Jefferson.
Robert G. Parkinson 18
54) The greatest weapon in the councils' arsenal was their campaign to disseminate information in the form of pamphlets, reprinted segregationist speeches, and packets of anti-integration propaganda. The very first pamphlet printed by founder Robert Patterson offered a bold statement and set the tone for future publications: "If we are bigoted, prejudiced, un-American, etc., so were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and our other illustrious forebears who believed in segregation."
Robert G. Parkinson 18-19
55) Southerners purchased the "major" segregationist polemicsâ€"Black Monday, Race and Reason, You and Segregation, and another book with Jefferson connections, North Carolina journalist W.E. Debnam's . . . Then My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!â€"by the thousands. Each had the endorsement of the Citizens' Council, which meant the tracts were widely reprinted and sold at extremely low prices across the South. All of these works base their argument on a selective yet viable interpretation of Jefferson's racial view.
Robert G. Parkinson 23
56) No matter how partisan this effort was, it is significant that the segregationists did not create their version of Jefferson out of whole cloth. Southern extremists who invoked Jefferson did so in good faith. Not unlike academic historians, segregationists too claimed a special knowledge of the "real" Jefferson.
Robert G. Parkinson 27
57) That they could enlist the writings of a revered American hero was all the justification segregationists needed. Through the simple act of lifting and applying Jefferson's anti-judiciary words, segregationists again powerfully linked the founding father to massive resistance.
Robert G. Parkinson 17
