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Don’t Help Trump Re-write History

Charlottesville demotes Thomas Jefferson Day, ignoring the consequences at the nation’s peril

Jim Moore
11 min readMar 3, 2020
Thomas Jefferson by Peale, Image Courtesy National Park Service. Illustration Jim Moore

Monday morning’s Washington Post did not bear much good news of any kind, an increasingly typical state-of-media-affairs. Political in-fighting, White House in continuing disarray, coronavirus infections and deaths, market instability, sliding 401(k)s, sadness, sickness, foreign woes, floods, droughts, toads, and locusts, etc. (only the toads part is made up). But one headline in particular caught my attention not for what it proclaimed in print, but for what it portends in policy:

“Charlottesville won’t celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. It will mark slavery’s end instead.”

The third paragraph was the harbinger of future bad news for the republic:

“For the first time since World War II, Charlottesville won’t honor the Founding Father’s birthday this spring. Instead, on Tuesday, the city will celebrate the demise of the institution with which Jefferson increasingly has become associated: slavery.”

We all get it

I’m not going to re litigate what has been hashed over for decades, if not centuries. Thomas Jefferson, along with many of the framers of the nation’s founding documents, owned slaves…

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Jim Moore
Jim Moore

Written by Jim Moore

Journalist, former Capitol Hill staff (House and Senate), former Cabinet speechwriter, editor, photojournalist and bird photographer. Top Writer Quora 2016–2017

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