Randall Kennedy

And he said in Notes on the State of Virginia, basically, we shall not overcome.

He talked, he said, you know, the black people will always know that their forebears were enslaved.

And they will always be resentful of that, always be aggrieved by that.

Jefferson did not think that we would ever have in the United States a multiracial democracy.

He was very critical of slavery.

Now, he was a hypocrite.

He had slaves.

He sold slaves.

He was terrible in that way.

But he did understand that slavery was horrible.

But...

He did not want to free the slaves for a variety of reasons.

And one reason was because he thought that it would be impossible to have a society in which blacks and whites were equal neighbors.

He was thoroughly pessimistic.

Another pessimist, Alexis de Tocqueville, thoroughly pessimistic.

Who were some of the other pessimists?

Abraham Lincoln, pessimistic.

That's why he was so interested in colonization.

He basically said, you know, I don't like slavery, but blacks and whites are not going to be able to share the United States.

Maybe the best we can do is just, you know, put blacks, ship blacks someplace else.