He had no power to free his wife?s slaves, which included her colored half sister. On her death her slaves were inherited by the children of her first marriage. Jefferson did not free his slaves except for a few. He and the other founding fathers would have been astonished by the idea of educating blacks. Before slavery was abolished in the North, even Benjamin Franklin owned house slaves.

The eastern and southern parts of the US were built by slaves who cut down forests and cultivated the land. In the early days, white indentured servants and slaves worked on the farms in the North (See Sojoiner Truths autobiography).

I am descended from a 10-year-old indentured servant in Philadelphia as well as a woman whose family hid runaway slaves in Delaware. It irritates me to read of white men being equal to each other when so much of the United States has denied and continues to deny in sneaky ways the rights of the masses of Blacks that prosperous white males enjoy, including some found in the Bill of Rights.

About 15 years ago, right after my Jamaican husband died, my brother and his Southern wife visited. He asked me why Blacks could not rise like the Vietnamese. I told him that Vietnamese have commercial experience and capital. After slavery four million blacks were denied opportunity for education and restricted in employment, segregated, discriminated against and even murdered if they tried for rise. Whites have sat on their heads and tried to confine them to the ditch in a culture that was, and is, secretly and sometimes openly white supremacist and hostile to the masses of black people.

(Signed) Anne K. Lowe