George,

Regarding the Roger Wilkins take on Jefferson's contribution to the lasting legacy of racism in this country I have little to add:

We are today what we are, the result of actions about which no one could know the outcome. My question, though, is has there ever been a nation, modern or otherwise, where distinct races lived in parity and comity? Is there something we can learn from that?

Al Weed (electronic mail, July 9, 2001).

Editor's Note: Roger Wilkins is the author of "Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism."

Al Weed is commenting on selections from Roger Wilkins' book beginning on page 136, where Wilkins says of Thomas Jefferson:

"He maintained until his death that he wished there was some way for blacks to be exported so that the slavery he so detested could be eradicated; yet he found it impossible to live a slaveless life. From his earliest memory of being carried on a pillow by one slave to the day he was lowered into the earth in a coffin made by another, Thomas Jefferson led a life cushioned by the subjugation of others.

On the issue of Sally Hemings, Jefferson turns out to have been a serious hypocrite. He wrote vigorous denunciations of miscegenation even as it was clearly occurring with some regularity at Monticello. Either he was participating in it himself, as the DNA evidence seems to suggest, or, as the white Jefferson family told it, one of his nephews fathered Ms. Heming's children (a claim refuted by the DNA evidence). In any event, the patriarch of the plantation had it in his power to stop the exploitation of Sally Hemings, and he did not choose to do so. To describe Jefferson as purely great is to do an enormous disservice to the humanity of this profoundly human man, and to undervalue the many occasions on which he rose above the ordinary messiness of his spirit to leave great gifts to posterity."

Wilkins goes on to say of George Washington, George Mason, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson:

"The founding slave owners were more than good men; they were great men. But when myth presents them as secular saints, and when an attempt is made to whitewash their ownership of slaves and the deep legacy of racism that they helped to institutionalize, the impulse to pull them and the works of their whole generation off their pedestals becomes exceedingly strong."

and that: Democracy "is the as-yet-unfinished story of the aboliton of chattel slavery in America and the rise of blacks out of that much and misery, and of whites' gradual abandoment of the chains of sinful racial privilege and constricted human understanding, and of the extension of freedom and opportunities to women, gays and lesbians, and all other minority groups in the country."