From President Donald J. Trump:
One of our nation’s gravest sins was the unconscionable owning of slaves. That practice has left a legacy of racial disparities and discrimination. Yet our unvarnished past, for better or worse, is a prologue to the future: Learning from it can help shape our course forward.
Unfortunately, Mayor Bill de Blasio has sought to have a statue of Thomas Jefferson booted from City Hall, where it has stood for 187 years, because America’s third president owned slaves. This accomplishes nothing and could actually do more harm than good. Yet on Monday, the panel he tapped to make the decision voted to move the figure from its current location by year’s end, though it’s not clear where.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, lawyer, architect, musician, philosopher and Founding Father. He was an author of the Declaration of Independence. At a dinner for Nobel Prize winners, President John Kennedy joked, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Jefferson was responsible for the deal that created the Louisiana Purchase and thereby doubled the size of the United States. He founded the University of Virginia.
Read the full article by Andrew Stein with the New York Post here.
