Rex Ellis: Good morning everyone, my name is Rex Ellis. I am the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture—that's just a long title that says I do whatever they tell me to do. What we’ve tried to do with this exhibition is to suggest three things. Number one, we've tried to grapple with the whole idea of slavery especially in the era of the American Revolution and the paradox of liberty—those who are asking for liberty actually being those who are also slave owners. That's the paradox that we examine and try to talk about. Second thing that we wanted to do was to talk about Jefferson and his life. A little bit about Albemarle, a little bit about his parents, and a little bit about Jefferson the man and the sort of paradox that he is as well. Not only his public life, but his private life as well. There's a third section that happens to focus on the enslaved population at Monticello. That enslaved population reached, at some point throughout his lifetime, over 600 people. And so, we feel that there's—it's difficult to understand Jefferson without understanding his enslaved population. You will be introduced to six families within that larger population. And then finally, there is a section that we are calling, for lack of a better term, "Getting Word," because that is the name of the project that in 1993 two historians at Monticello embarked on to try to find descendants of the enslaved at Monticello. And that section talks about those descendants and where they are and the kinds of things that they are doing. What you see on the outside here are two visions that in some way suggest this whole paradox that we're talking about. Here is Thomas Jefferson and he's behind the Declaration of Independence; and here is Isaac Jefferson, he was a Granger, but he changed his name once he was freed to Jefferson. He is behind a farm book that Jefferson kept from 1770 all the way up until the beginning of the 19th century. That book was supposed to be a sort of diary of his farm and it has turned into one of the most important sources that give us some sense of who the enslaved were and what they did. Because as you see here, there are families that he mentions within the farm book; so with that information we know approximately when they were born, we know what their names were, and we can someway put them into the historical record in ways that we could not if we did not have this information. Also I will tell you that I don't believe Monticello is typical of the slave experience in the Colonial Chesapeake, I think it's very atypical. As you go through it, I think you will see that there are sort of parallels to the larger slave system. But Mr. Jefferson in a variety of ways was a unique man. He was a scholar, he was an author, he was an inventor, he was a farmer—he'd tell you he was a farmer, other folk would tell you no, no, no, he wasn't too good a farmer. But in a variety of ways he was a very, very—that sort of quintessential Enlightenment man who was much more of a Renaissance figure than he was sort of ensconced in the colonial period, as many were. They looked to him and what he said to determine what they should be thinking, in many ways. So as you go through, keep that in mind as well. Rex Ellis: This first area focuses on Jefferson and the idea that in order to see Jefferson clearly you must see him through the lens of his enslaved population. You will see a statue of Jefferson and then behind him you will see a series of names. They are names of over 600 enslaved—that we know—lived and worked in and around Monticello. And the idea here, again, is it allows us to see Jefferson more clearly. You will also see here Jefferson's lap desk, which was what he drafted the Declaration of Independence on. So in many ways that lap desk and the statue of Jefferson and what you see around it—the information you see around it gives you some sense of Jefferson's prominence, not only in the colonial period, but also his prominence as a slave owner. Christopher Hamner: I wanted to do, since we didn't get a chance yesterday, to do a little debrief on the museum and what was particularly useful about it, what changed the way that you thought about the past, what changed the way that you think about this chapter to your kids. Do you remember what the sort of framing is? Teacher 1: It's the Declaration of Independence on the one side— Teacher 2: On the right. Teacher 3: It's slavery— Teacher 4: The farm book on the left. Christopher Hamner: Yeah, right. And just those two images, you have to pick one or two things that go on the outside. And then the title: "Paradox of Liberty." This is all really carefully selected to get you thinking some new way about this person. If you just want to think about context and you want to think about content and this as a source. Think about how different the experience you have of Thomas Jefferson is if you spend 22 minutes in the "Paradox of Liberty" exhibit at the Smithsonian verses 22 minutes at the Jefferson Memorial, which is not very far away. How do you summarize a life if you've got…you can use 61 images, you can have a total of 12 hundred words, and the average visitor is going to spend 18 to 22 minutes walking through there. What parts of the story do you tell and what do you leave out. When I approached it that way I thought, gosh this is an impossible task that they have carried off really well.

Rex Ellis: The objectives in this area are several. Number one, to give you some sense of slavery in the Atlantic world, especially in the colonial period. Then to give you some sense of Mr. Jefferson and the kind of background and upbringing he had. Then to suggest some sense about Jefferson's attitude towards slavery. At the beginning on the wall that I'm facing you will see a variety of things that suggest the institution of slavery. There's a small map on the left-hand side of that portrait by George Morland that gives you some sense of the number of Africans who came to the New World. You will see that they came from all portions of Africa, from Senegal to the Bight of Biafra to the Bight of Benin all the way over to West Central Africa, even Madagascar and other places. But the largest number comes from, as you will see, West Central Africa. Somewhere around 5 million Africans disembarked in places like Pernambuco, Brazil, and South America. Somewhere around four million landed in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, Haiti, Cuba, those areas. Four hundred thousand came to North America. Four hundred thousand. Whether they were dealing with slave ships, building slave ships, and going—and transporting Africans back and forth, the American economy—the agricultural economy of America in some way, directly or indirectly, depended on the institution of slavery. So Jefferson from the very beginning of his life, there was an enslaved person who actually put him on a pillow and presented him to his father, Peter, and his mom, Jane. There was a slave at the end of his life, his name was Burwell Colbert, who actually fluffed up his pillow because he was the only one who understood what Jefferson was saying when he was at the end of his life and couldn't speak. He was the only one who understood that he was uncomfortable and that he needed his pillow adjusted. So, from the time he was born until the time he died, slavery was a part of the world that he lived in. Here you see a series of items that relate to the period of the Enlightenment. You see an inkwell by Voltaire, that's an image of Voltaire's head. You see glasses and you see Jefferson—who was a voracious reader, by the way—you see this revolving bookstand where he could read one, two, three, four, five books at a time. Speaker 1: You know how he had that bookstand, where he could read five books at a time and keep them open so you don't lose your place? And then you walk a couple feet that way, and some guy, his whole day every day is to pound nails. Like, so you get to do all of this fascinating stuff, and the people working for you are pounding nails over and over and over. And you saw, there were like five steps to making a nail and your sole goal is to make the most nails. So you get to be creative, thoughtful, and everybody around you has to be bored? Christopher Hamner: You know, I took away like the "Paradox of Liberty," that there's this really uncomfortable connection there. That some people were free to do all this grand philosophical thinking about politics and government and the nature of morals because other people were bored. You know, the fact that Jefferson—the leisure time that Jefferson enjoyed was on the part built on the backs of enslaved people piling up all this wealth and stuff so that he was freed. Rex Ellis: You will see here some sense of what we're suggesting about his view of enslavement. And you will find out as you read that Jefferson was not—that Jefferson believed in emancipation. He did not believe that emancipation was something that could happen here. He believed in emancipation connected with colonization. So that he felt that blacks and whites could not live together and once they were set free they should be delivered some place else in order to enjoy their freedom. Interestingly, 1791 he has a letter—somewhere around August he has a letter from a man named Benjamin Banneker. He's an African American, he's a scientist, he is an author, a very, very learned person himself. He writes a letter, what he said was he wanted Jefferson to help and to assist in the liberation of his people, he used—he sent him a copy of the almanac, he used himself as a way of saying, "This is what's possible given the help, given the education, given the support, this is what's possible within the black community." Eleven days later, Jefferson wrote him back and said wonderful letter, wonderful almanac, but I don't believe that the enslaved can in any way rise to the level of intelligence and the level of sophistication that you have risen to. So I generally say to folk when they ask me what I think about Jefferson, I say he was a man who was in terms of his intellect, he was ahead of his time; in terms of his morality, he was a product of his time. I think, more than most, though, Jefferson grappled with this issue. Speaker 1: I think that kind of summarized the entire exhibit, was that intellectually Jefferson was ahead of his time, but philosophically he was a product of his time. Speaker 2: And that's so current for today, though. Speaker 3: He did a good job at not giving you the answer for how we should judge him, not saying he was this or he was that. I think what it does effective to us is we're all a product of our time now, we might think that other people are wrong. Two hundred years from now everyone might think we're all wrong. So it kinda makes you step back, too, and think, well, how do I see my time? Christopher Hamner: I think it shows we're supposed to—sometimes we forget but we're a fairly young country. And now we're kind of looking at it and saying, yeah, well, you know we got some things right and we got some things wrong and it's okay to look at both of those so that maybe we can be more right the next time.

Christopher Hamner: What were the objects or the text or—what part did you stop and go, "Whoa." Teacher 1: I thought that the map, the to-scale of his entire plantation in the back was really, really interesting. Christopher Hamner: What was it that kind of— Teacher 1: Well, there were two parts. One, obviously, his house is so built on that hill it's almost on a mountain compared with his farmlands. I thought that's interesting management-wise. He's got kind of like a little town up near his house, and yet he's got these dispersed houses throughout the farmlands. And then I started thinking did he give his slaves who lived in those farmhouses somewhat of an autonomy as they were farming those areas because his house was miles away on top. Rex Ellis: Mulberry Row I think is very important. It's a 13-hundred-foot space on the northeastern side of the house. If this is Monticello here, and this is the north here, and this is the east, here is Mulberry Row. Somewhere around 20 homes is what it had on it, domestic spaces, as well as—there was a nailery, there was a blacksmith's shop, there was a textile shop, there were domestic houses, dairy. You either worked as a domestic, you either worked as tradesman or a craftsman, or you worked in the fields. Generally those were the three areas. Mulberry Row became a real proving ground to determine which one of those might be your fate. Between 12 and 16, Jefferson would engage them in work, males and females, at Mulberry Row. He would use that to make some determination about where the aptitudes were and where he would then assign those who he had working there. Then he brought a variety of people from around the country and even outside of the country, Scottish tradesmen and craftsmen, to teach the enslaved at Monticello a variety of the skills. So a variety of those were sort of determined based on the experience at Mulberry Row. Christopher Hamner: And then how was the other way that you encountered enslaved people at Monticello. Teacher 1: Through their lineage. Christopher Hamner: Okay. Whose? Teacher 1: One of the most famous would be the Hemings. There was— Teacher 2: The Grangers. Teacher 3: The Fossetts. Christopher Hamner: That second part of the exhibit, remember, the six families, that struck me as another choice. You know, what are we going to do? Instead of trying to cover all 600, they made this choice that we'll pick six—one well known and maybe some that are less well known, but we’ll really focus on that, just on those families' experiences. Rex Ellis: Now, these families, George Granger is the only man I know that was actually assigned to be an overseer at Jefferson. During Jefferson's lifetime he must have had over 30 overseers on the property. Granger was the only one that he had that was from the black community. And Granger was one of those that we use at least to suggest that Jefferson wasn't someone who was so struck by color until he didn't understand that it was merit that was the most important in terms of whom he allowed to do work, whom he allowed freedoms, and whom he did not allow freedoms. But there is an argument to be made for the precedent of the Hemings family. There were five generations of that family on the hill, over 70 people in that family on the mountain, started with Elizabeth Hemings who was the matriarch of the family and five generations of her family were at Monticello. The Hemings were treated differently, they were given freedoms no one else was given, several of them were even allowed to not only work, but to live off the mountain, and also to sort of move around as free people even though they were owned by Jefferson. You will find that the Hemings were the ones who did either the least work or worked as domestics or received privileges that others did not receive. And then finally for me the Fossett family. They were also Hemings but they were—Joseph Fossett was the grandson of Elizabeth. Joseph, the reason I wanted to mention him is because Joseph was the only member of his family that was freed in Jefferson's will. He set Fossett free, but Fossett was not free at the time that the auction took place, so he could not bid on his family. He watched his family being sold away. But he also knew some folk in Albemarle County that he had done business with, so he made requests of them that they purchase members of his family, and that, as a blacksmith, he was able to work and he promised and whatever it was that they paid for the price for them that he would then pay them back the price of his family. Somewhere in 1837, he purchased five of his children and four of his grandchildren and they all moved to Ohio. Teacher 1: The Hemings family, there were like these really nice pots from France and I just thought that helped paint a complex picture of Jefferson. Teacher 2: Right, I thought that—I enjoyed learning about the families, it was interesting to see the different dynamic that that plantation would have had than a lot of others. But I thought, too, it kind of focused on the fact that these were his most skilled slaves. They had the chair that that one person built, I know he had a trained French chef as a slave, that's not normal. Christopher Hamner: You get to know those six families really well, but at the same time you lose sight of all these people. And that's a trade-off. Do you want them to learn a couple of people's experience really deeply, or do you want them to get a bigger sense of the whole, the whole enormity of the operation.

Rex Ellis: Interestingly, that Joseph Fossett that I was telling you about, Joe Fossett had a great-grandson by the name of William Monroe Trotter, who founded—with W.E.B. Dubois—the Niagara Movement, he was an activist himself, a very, very well educated man. All of the families, the Hughes family, the Fossett family, the Hemings family, all took on responsibilities that in many ways were civic responsibilities. Frederick Madison Roberts, that you'll see on this end, was the first African American legislator in California. You will see also that the descendents of Sally Hemings and of Eston and Madison fought in the Civil War. So that continuation of family, that continuation of faith, Peter Fossett became a minister. It was Peter who said this, "My parents were here in Ohio and I wanted to be with them and be free, so I resolved to get free or die in the attempt." Peter ran away several times and was recaptured. And finally with the help of his family his freedom was bought and he finally rejoined his family in Ohio. Christopher Hamner: I thought this was one of the best museum exhibits that I'd ever seen. And I was particularly impressed because it's really sensitive. Plus, it's the Smithsonian Museum of American History, it's on the Mall, it's yards from the White House, and a stone's throw from the Congress building. There's a sense that this is the official history, it has this sort of weight based on where it is and the fact that it's the Smithsonian. Teacher 1: What struck me, I was wondering if this means how far we've come as a society, because do you think that 50 years ago you could have had an exhibit like this? Christopher Hamner: No, and that's something they didn't talk about, but I love the way that you're thinking in terms of this as a source. If you went back 50 years ago, totally different. Teacher 2: I liked the human touch to it, because they're much more complicated and they have to deal with their times. Rex Ellis: We know a great deal about a small number of the enslaved at Monticello. I told you there were over 600; I've introduced you to maybe 30 or 40 that we know a great deal about. Don't you dare leave thinking that those other 500 are not important as well. The fact that we have their names is a testament to Jefferson's record keeping and also to the history and the historians who have made this all happen. But if you ask me why I would say that Jefferson was anomalous and he was not normal—Jefferson said that he did not want—and I'm paraphrasing—but he said he wanted his enslaved population to respect him; he did not want them to fear him. He tried to keep the families together, he discouraged abroad marriages, he tried to get them to marry on the mountain so that the family was together there. So all of that is what makes me suggest that as a slave owner—Now I don't think that there is such a thing as a "good" slave owner, especially someone like Jefferson—when you think of the fact that he was governor of Virginia, when you think of the fact that he was a two-term president, when you think of the fact that he was Secretary of State, he had a variety of opportunities to do something significant about the institution of slavery. He never did. So, there is that reality to him; but there's also the other reality. And I think the public Jefferson and the private Jefferson are two different Jeffersons all together. In order to see Jefferson clearly, you have to see him through the lens of his enslaved community as well.

Christina Chavarria: So just kind of look around. What feeling is evoked? Is there anything that might remind you of something? Or maybe nothing at all. Visitor 1: We were just taking [about] the stairs. Almost as if you can be kind of spread out, and then as you go up closer you have to bunch together to file in. I've never seen stairs that do that, it's weird. Christina Chavarria: Okay, that's true. And when you mention that I think of also the train tracks and how they're kind of elongated and they fade and they seem to become more narrow the further away they become. Anybody else have any thoughts about the architecture, the building? Visitor 2: I think it's overwhelming. It makes you feel small. Christina Chavarria: That's very true. That's a very good point. Because, like I said, going back to the importance of the individual in this history, one of the things that we do with teachers is that we really encourage that you translate statistics into people, that instead of focusing solely on the millions of victims or the thousands who may have died in one place, you take those individual stories and you pull them out using primary resources. Christina Chavarria: What the purpose of these cards do, especially in a teaching standpoint, is, again, they focus on the individual. How many of you have somebody who is not Jewish? Anybody have somebody who is not Jewish? Okay, who? Visitor 3: I have Lucian Belie Brunell. He's born to Catholic parents, he's a priest. Christina Chavarria: Okay, we have a priest. Anybody else have somebody who is not Jewish, somebody who is Roma? Disabled? Okay, how about does somebody have—how many of you have somebody from Poland? Germany? Austria? Italy? France? Denmark? The Netherlands? Greece? Yugoslavia? Okay, any other place that I did not mention? Visitor 4: Romania. Visitor 5: Lithuania. Visitor 6: Hungary. Visitor 7: Czechoslovakia. Christina Chavarria: So another purpose of these is for us to see the range of geography. That this did not happen solely in Germany, even though it began there. This did not happen only in Poland. That it spread geographically. It spread all the way into Northern Africa and other parts of the world were impacted, even if they were not occupied by Nazi Germany. Christina Chavarria: Look at the monitor. TV Documentary: "—called in by radio, said that we have come across something and we're not sure what it is. It's a big prison of some kind, and there are people running all over—sick, dying, starved people. You can't imagine it, things like that don't happen." Christina Chavarria: So as we go through, as I mentioned downstairs, I'm not going to point out everything to you, but there are certain elements that I want to point out because we will talk about them in the afternoon. This, in particular, I think is very striking for us as teachers, as social studies teachers, as teachers in the United States. You notice at the top it says, "Americans encounter the camp." We don't use the word in this picture—we don't use the word "liberation." Why not? You couldn't just walk out and go home, first of all. And liberation has that connotation of being free, and yet the obstacles that lay ahead for those who did survive will be so vast—the obstacles, the challenges, for the Allied forces and relief workers who come into the camps. So, we chose that word "encounter." And this was not, as we know now, this was not the first that we knew of the camps. It was the first maybe that we had seen of the camps with our own eyes, but we will see that. When you look at this history again we define it the years 1933–1945. Christina Chavarria: Where you all came in, we call that the Eisenhower Plaza. This quote up here that's on the side of the building, of the museum structure. Because if you look at it, I think this is an excellent quote to use with students because it takes us back to that theme of anti-Semitism and that theme today of Holocaust denial.

Christina Chavarria: I think as teachers here in the United States, the issue of race science, which was very popular in the United States, it was not only in Nazi Germany. If you look at your own states—if each individual state looks at its history—you can look and see the laws that were on the books regarding sterilization, regarding who could marry whom. So, again, looking at U.S. history, especially in the latter part of the 19th century and the eugenics movement and how this became so popular. And the whole notion of race, the definition of race, and categorizing people. This is very, very relevant. Christina Chavarria: What are the questions that your students ask when you're teaching this? How many of you have taught about the Holocaust? Visitor 1: They want to know why; they want to know how could this have started? They want to know, you know, why is Hitler so anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic? They want to know the root of it all. Visitor 2: They want to know, too, why they willingly were prisoners. You know, 7th grade, why, I would have not done this— Christina Chavarria: I would have fought back, right? And they did, that's a very good issue to bring up. They did, and we have to teach about resistance. One of the questions related to that is: Why didn’t they just leave? Why didn't they just pack up and go somewhere else? Well, again, the complexities of this history—don't avoid those questions when they ask you. Why didn't, why couldn't they just pack up and leave? We look at the Évian Conference, which is where we look at the failure of other nations to respond to the growing crisis in Europe. And this symbolizes that, this political cartoon. This appeared in the New York Times, July 3, 1938, just before the Évian Conference was to begin. So we can take this image and we can deconstruct this, and what do we see happening here? Visitor 3: The guy's at a stop sign with no place to go. Christina Chavarria: The stop sign is on what? Multiple Visitors: A swastika. Christina Chavarria: Every point, every direction ends with that halt—you can't, you can't go. And who is this person? Visitor 4: Non-Aryan. Christina Chavarria: Non-Aryan, presumably Jewish—the kippah. And what's on the horizon? The Évian Conference invited nations to attend to discuss the growing refugee problem. So 32 countries send representatives to this conference, but, yet, they're also told we're not going to ask you to take any more people in. So the conference was basically a failure before it even began because only one country stepped forward and said, "We're willing to take in more refugees than what we have on our quotas, listed as our quotas." Does anybody know what that country was, what that one country was? It's right down here. The Dominican Republic. This also revealed a lot of anti-Semitic thought from leaders of other nations. Some countries said, "We don't have a Jewish problem and we don't want to import one." Some said, "We're going through our own issues." And that's very true, because we've got to contextualize this from what happened in the 1920s, what happened in 1929, the economic—the Depression as well. But, yet, we also have to factor in anti-Semitic sentiments because who are these refugees? Well, they're mostly Jewish, they might take our jobs, they might take—we don't have money to support them.

Christina Chavarria: Looking at the whole idea of refuge, and the search for refuge, where do you go when nations have closed their doors to you? Where do you go? What kind of documentation do you need to get out of Germany? What documents do you need? What kind of money do you need to emigrate? These are all issues that you have to bring up with your students so that they understand why they were trapped in Europe. Christina Chavarria: This chart that we see here, this is the forced immigration chart that Adolf Eichmann's office produced to show how it was able to expel, within three years, most of Vienna's Jewish population. After the Anschluss, after Kristallnacht, this is when Jews in the occupied territories—Germany, Austria, parts of Czechoslovak—after Kristallnacht, they realized that they can no longer stay. Life is just not bearable any more; in fact it's dangerous now. In many cases, many of them actually bought visas to get out. Some countries made money, some diplomats made money selling fraudulent visas that turned out to be no good. And that is what happened with the voyage of the St. Louis. Out of the 937 passengers who were on the boat, almost—I think all but maybe six to eight of them were Jewish. They needed to get out, and Cuba was the destination of this ship, the St. Louis. It was owned by the Hamburg line, Hamburg America. They had acquired visas to go to Cuba, where they were planning to stay until their numbers came up to come to the United States. But before they reached Cuba, their visas were rescinded; in fact, many of them were fraudulent, only about 28 of them were actually valid. So when they got to Havana, they were not allowed to dock. Only those who had valid visas, which was just a miniscule number out of the over 900 those people were allowed to stay, and the rest could not get off the boat.

Christina Chavarria: Here you see newspapers from some of the major cities across the country reporting on the front page certain events that were taking place in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. Right here, for example, the Dallas Morning News: Kristallnacht, November 1938, front page. This was not a secret. Christina Chavarria: This is called "The Tower of Faces." This is one thing I want to point out to you because—just take a couple minutes to look around at the pictures. This represents one shtetl, one Jewish community, in Lithuania. The little girl right here is Professor Yaffa Eliach, she lives in New York. She went back to this shtetl, Eishyshok, and she gathered the 10,000 photos, many of which you see here, and which we have online. Again, what this does, we look at the individual; we look at the victim not as a "victim," but as a vibrant human being. I think anything we teach, whether it's the Holocaust or any other topic that we're looking at in history, we have to look at the individuals. Christina Chavarria: This milk can is one of three milk cans that was used to bury documents and chronicles of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. And in 1950, two of the milk cans were excavated as well as the other metal boxes. Within them they found a very rich documentation of what life in the ghetto was like. Christina Chavarria: Actual barracks that are on loan to us from Poland, they are not replicas. Right over here we have a large-scale model of the process of going through the selection, going to the gas chambers, because we don't have any photos of the actual gassing, of course. Christina Chavarria: The diary, the quote, and the armband, take a look at that. The diary is the first diary that was donated to us by an American in captivity. Most of the diaries that we see they were written when they were in hiding or before they had to leave, but he was able to keep his diary while he was in the camp. It's also striking because Anthony Acevedo—he's not Jewish, in fact he's the son of Mexican immigrants. He is—we consider him to be a survivor, because of the fact that he went through a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Christina Chavarria: This is one of over a thousand citizenship papers that was found in somebody's attic in Switzerland. In a suitcase were these documents, these citizenship papers, issued by El Salvador that stated that the individuals who were named in the documents, whose pictures appeared on the documents were citizens of El Salvador, when in reality they were not—most of them were Hungarian Jews. This is 1944, Hungary is invaded in the spring of 1944 by Germany, and out of about 500,000 Hungarian Jews, over 430,000 died at Auschwitz in a very short period of time.