Ali Velshi
speaker
554 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 16 Sep
Ali Velshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And not just here, but now, on this night, June 25th, 1776.
250 years ago today, at the corner of 7th and Market, Thomas Jefferson was in the final days of writing the most consequential sentence in the history of human governance.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
He wasn't alone in that room.
14-year-old Robert Hemmings was there.
on call 24 hours a day, helping Jefferson dress, bringing him tea, making sure that he was not disturbed.
Hemings was Jefferson's enslaved servant.
He could not read the words that Jefferson wrote.
He would never possess the rights that were promised by those words.
He was, in the legal sense of the word, property.
And yet there he was, in the room, less than a mile from where you sit, on this very night 250 years ago.
All men are created equal.
When Jefferson finished writing, he walked the documents two blocks south to Independence Hall where it was debated and it was signed and it was celebrated.
Robert Hemmings was present at its creation, but he was not present for the celebration.
That contradiction, a man writing the promise of a universal equality while a 14-year-old boy, legally his property, stands in the same room, that is not a footnote to American history because sometimes democracy does not unfold the way you hope it does.
That is American history.
There is, interestingly, no image of Robert Hemmings.
We know a lot about Thomas Jefferson.
We know, in fact, that he was about 6'2", which was unusually tall for the day.
He was about the same size as George Washington.
Showing 141–160 of 554 · page 8 of 28
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