For 33 years, National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition”Steve Inskeep, host of the show, has made it a tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence every Fourth of July. But this year, he broke that tradition, replacing it with a segment examining what Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase “all men are created equal” actually means in relation to today’s sharply divided United States.
Inskeep interviewed Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, who wrote a book in 1997 about Thomas Jefferson’s affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and the children born from that relationship. Jill Lepore from Harvard was also interviewed by Jefferson, who stated that Jefferson borrowed the idea of Enlightenment thinkers.
“It’s fashionable, and rightfully so, to indict the limits of [Jefferson’s] vision,”Lepore stated. “But in the 18th century, even the idea that all white men are created equal was a radical notion at the time. Those men lived in a highly ranked culture, and a declaration of equality is throwing that away, or challenging that in a revolutionary manner.”
Gordon-Reed claimed that Jefferson understood that writing is contradictory “all men are created equal”While living on a slave farm. He imagined a path to freedom that would allow Black slaves to be freed and create their own sovereign nation.
“He didn’t think that Blacks would forgive whites for what they had done and he believed whites would never give up their prejudices, and so we would be in a state of conflict,”She spoke. “And we don’t want to hear this, but we have been in a state of conflict.”
The segment then examines how the phrase works. “all men are created equal” has been used to call out America’s hypocrisy all the way back to its earliest years. The phrase was even used against Jefferson himself, as Black naturalist Benjamin Banneker challenged the Declaration writer to abolish slavery based on the ideals he wrote in letters exchanged between the two while Jefferson was serving as the nation’s first secretary of state.
This phrase was used by Martin Luther King Jr., an abolitionist, and civil rights icon, over the centuries.
Listen to the entire NPR segmentHere.
