What, if anything, should be done with the Jefferson Memorial?

Or, for that matter what should be done with any one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of schools and other buildings named after Jefferson, including the elementary school in Summit, New Jersey where my mother taught for over two decades.

That’s the #stampoftheday question brought on by the fact that today is Thomas Jefferson’s 278th birthday as well as the 78th anniversary of the dedication of the iconic memorial. Indeed, with only five posts to go in this project, the question almost feels like it’s part of a final exam because even more than many of the complicated people I’ve written about in the last year, Jefferson really embodies both the very best and the very worst of America.

One the one hand, he’s an iconic figure, as illustrated by the fact that he was the third person to be pictured on a US postage stamp, appearing on the 12th stamp issued by the US Post Office in 1856. This was only five years after the first stamps, which pictured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington,. The centrality of Jefferson in the American pantheon is further underscored by the fact that Andrew Jackson, the fourth person to appear on a stamp , didn’t appear until the 71st stamp, in 1861. The fifth was Lincoln, who joined the pantheon in 1867, two years after he was killed. Throughout this time Jefferson appeared regularly on stamps including today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp issued in 1870, a year before any other luminaries were portrayed on a stamp.

This is the Jefferson who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and who continues to be ranked by historians as among the handful of truly great presidents. It’s also the Jefferson who founded the University of Virginia, wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom which became a model for the First Amendment, and was a man of the Enlightenment, with incredibly wide-ranging interests from music and wine to architecture and natural history. It’s the Jefferson on the bonus stamp today, a 1960 stamp from the American Credo series.

As Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Gordon Wood wrote in The New York Review of Books several years ago, Jefferson became, and in some respects still is, the “spokesman for American liberty” whose work provided the foundation that Abraham Lincoln used to mobilize support for the fight against slavery. Moreover, Wood noted, “Jefferson is not just a spokesman for democracy and equality. He personified the American Enlightenment and set forth the progressive promise of America’s future….The range of his intellectual and cultural concerns was staggering to his contemporaries and is still breathtaking for us. Surely no political figure in American history, and certainly no president, has had such expansive and varied interests as Jefferson.”

Or, as John F. Kennedy famously noted at a 1962 White House dinner for 13 Nobel laureates, “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.”

This is the Jefferson I grew up with. But, of course, there is another Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and the man who took his mulatto slave, Sally Hemings, as his concubine and fathered at least six children with her, four of whom lived to adulthood.

This is the Jefferson who though he had spoken out against slavery earlier in his life, stopped speaking against slavery in the 1790s and not only benefitted from their work but even used them as collateral for a large loan he took out in 1796 to rebuild Monticello. And while he had a reputation of being a kind owner but who sometimes allowed his overseers to whip them.

And this is the Jefferson who not only didn’t free his slaves when he died but also didn’t protect them. As a result, after he died in 1826 the families of his even his most devoted slaves were split up. As Wood noted: “That the spokesman for our democracy should be a slaveholding aristocrat is surely the greatest irony in a history full of ironies.”

What then should we do about that Jefferson-and about the many buildings and statues?

What should we do about the Jefferson Memorial where the words are carved on the wall not only include the famed phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” but also include one of his critiques of slavery: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”

Should we follow the lead of Peoria, which in late March announced that it would rename schools that had been named after Jefferson, as well as Calvin Coolidge and Charles Lindbergh?

Should we follow the lead of the Board of Supervisors in Virginia’s Albermarle County (where Jefferson was born) who last week passed a resolution noting “we want to express gratitude for the immense contributions Thomas Jefferson made to our community and to our country while also holding space for the harm he caused the Black community in Albemarle County, including the people enslaved at Monticello and elsewhere and their descendants.”

Perhaps we should listen to Shannon LaNier, a newscaster descended from Jefferson and Hemings, who in 2002 published “Jefferson’s Children: The Story Of One American Family.” Last July, in the midst of the summer’s protests, NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked LaNier, “what would you do with that memorial if it were up to you?”

“Why not make it a true freedom center since they want to give credit to Jefferson for writing those words?” LaNier replied. “Leave the words on the wall. Maybe remove the statue. Maybe surround his statue with other people that are symbols of freedom. The image of Jefferson is very painful. Some people see him as a slave owner. Some people see him as a rapist. Some people see him as more than just the founder of this country. So I think you have to have an opportunity to educate people. We can’t just look at history as a one-sided narrative. We have to tell the full story and the – even if it’s painful, even if it’s hurtful. We can’t get to a place of healing and reconciliation until we address it….It’s a great opportunity for this country to get it right, to say I see you; we recognize you; we understand your pain.”

I don’t know exactly how we get there, but that’s where I want to go.

Be well, stay safe, “get to a place of healing and reconciliation,” fight for justice, and work for peace.