U.S. has yet to overcome its tortured racial past. "For a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nation’s prospects, it was a darkly pessimistic prophesy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if — as he hoped — America’s black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an inevitable descent into racial war. And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war...has been waged against blacks in America from Jefferson’s time until our own." Annette Gordon-Reed in The Financial Times.
Thomas Jefferson's descendants by his sex slave, Sally Hemings
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