Slave-owning Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump are soulless brothers

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

When reading and hearing about or watching the cold-blooded, despicable way Donald Trump has been treating the children of prospective immigrants to the United States from South America, it’s very revealing to note how the president’s atrocities are being covered in the national press.

On channel after channel, in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet, politicians, journalists and commentators, including most of the Black ones, go on and on about how “shocking and unprecedented” Trump’s actions are in United States history.

Such coverage clearly demonstrates that they are either ignorant of American history or even worse, ignoring it. During over 300 years of the enslavement of African people many thousands of Black families were torn apart and many thousands of Black children weren’t just taken away from their parents; they were sold on auction blocks by the Trumps of their day while their mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters and other relatives and friends were helplessly watching. And like the Latino children, I am sure the frightened Black children were weeping and wailing.

Among those who participated in the continuous atrocities was none other than one of Trump’s predecessors as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and his wife owned over 200 enslaved Africans. This was not taught to us when I attended public and Catholic schools from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. All we were taught about the third president of the United States was that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and was someone to be nearly worshipped.

I learned about the real Thomas Jefferson in a history class taught by the brilliant Dr. Harold Lewis, when a freshman at Howard University in 1961. It was that enslaving Jefferson, I learned, who when he died July 4, 1826, willed his over 200 enslaved Africans to family members, including his daughter, Martha.

According to a Washington Post article by David K. Ranka “…six months after Jefferson’s death 130 of those Black people were “put up for auction on Monticello’s grand West Portico. Not all of Monticello’s enslaved workers stood at auction that day…the head gardener, Wormley Hughes, also owned by Jefferson’s daughter, escaped the auction block, but his wife, Ursula, and eight of their children did not. So Hughes could only stand by and watch his family members be sold, one by one, to the highest bidders. An enslaved blacksmith, Joseph Fossett, set free in Jefferson’s will looked on as strangers competed for the chance to own his wife and children.” Obviously, Martha was a chip off the old block. It is this history that puts the cruelty inflicted by Trump on Latino children in a proper context.

The national press — New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, Time magazine — must cease covering Trump’s actions as some kind of aberration in U.S. history. In fact Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump are, in every sense of the words, cold-blooded Soulless (“lacking or suggesting the lack of human feelings and qualities”) Brothers. Think about that on July 4, 2018.

This article originally published in the July 9, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.