Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism

By Roger Wilkins

Book Overview

An outspoken participant in the civil rights movement, Roger Wilkins served as Assistant Attorney General during the Johnson administration. In 1972 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize along with Bernstein and Herblock for his coverage of Watergate. Yet this black man, who has served the United States so well, feels at times an unwelcome guest here. In Jefferson's Pillow, Wilkins returns to America's beginnings and the founding fathers who preached and fought for freedom, even though they owned other human beings and legally denied them their humanity. He asserts that the mythic accounts of the American Revolution have ignored slavery and oversimplified history until the heroes, be they the founders or the slaves in their service, are denied any human complexity. Wilkins offers a thoughtful analysis of this fundamental paradox through his exploration of the lives of George Washington, George Mason, James Madison, and of course Thomas Jefferson. He discusses how class, education, and personality allowed for the institution of slavery, unravels how we as Americans tell different sides of that story, and explores the confounding ability of that narrative to limit who we are and who we can become. An important intellectual history of America's founding, Jefferson's Pillow will change the way we view our nation and ourselves.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807009571
• ISBN13: 9780807009574
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A New View of Patriotism

No one doubts that the Founding Fathers, during the American Revolution, and the Constitutional Convention which followed it, produced a remarkable government to institute remarkable ideals of freedom and citizenship. They also did little to abolish the antithesis of freedom and citizenship, slavery. How can black people be patriots if this is so, and how are they to regard their portion of the American heritage? "Can I embrace the founders who may have `owned' some of my ancestors?" This is the backbone question of _Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism_ (Beacon) by Roger Wilkins. Wilkins has been an Attorney General, won a Pulitzer for his Watergate coverage, and has worked for the cause of civil rights within America and within Africa over several decades. He feels himself to be deeply American and deeply patriotic, and his book provides a guide to why there is no paradox to such feelings. It represents a new and useful way of looking at the founding of the country for both blacks and whites.The title of the book comes from Jefferson's first memory: being carried on a pillow by a slave riding on horseback. Wilkins accepts that such privileges of culture did shape the ideas of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Washington, but he looks at the role of slavery as something not contradictory to their efforts for freedom but as essential to those efforts. "The fact is that without black Americans, including the 40 percent of Virginians who were black, the America that General Washington led into revolution in 1775 would have been a vastly different place - a poorer and weaker place, much less capable of waging a successful revolt. And Mason, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison might themselves have been poorer, better, less conflicted, and more honest. I would argue that they might also have been less learned, less strategically astute, and less politically wise. Blacks and their works were present in the Revolution as essential elements both of its strengths and of the Virginians' greatness." Slaves at Monticello and Mount Vernon, in this view, worked in their own way as partners in the birth of the new nation, and toward eventual extension of its principles even to their descendents.In a wise book, Wilkins is forgiving of the addiction to privilege. He has capably blended national history, family history, and personal philosophy. He realizes that the Virginia aristocrats about whom he writes are really not to blame for accepting the privilege they had as simply being the natural way of the world. He has felt the same way, for instance, not questioning his privilege of student draft deferment during the Korean War, nor his commuting to work in a "powerful European sedan." He admits he has his moral challenges and his addictions, perhaps not on the moral level of slavery, but present and accepted nonetheless. "To be human is to live with moral complexity and existential ambiguity. I don't need for

Four Virginian founders, their influences and their legacy

In an age when Americans either lionize the founders and perform idolatry on them (see David McCullough) or disparage these men as hopelessly racist and dysfunctional, Wilkins performs another great service for his fellow Americans- he sees these men clearly for what they were and still are. Studying four Virginians (Jefferson, Mason, Madison and Washington), Wilkins looks at their writings and their culture and draws out their views on freedom and slavery. Comparing these views with their acts toward black Americans and the culture of 18th century slave-holding Virginia, he sees this quartet as both shaping and shaped by the world in which they live. They are Americans after all, with all the complexity and idealism that comes with being a thoughtful American. Of the four, Jefferson perhaps gets knocked around the most, but then he deserves such treatment more than his fellows. But Wilkins is not interested in scoring points against these men; rather, he seeks to understand why such educated and thoughtful men could build a nation with a great and wicked contradiction at its heart- the existence of slavery in a land devoted, on its face, to freedom. As usual, Wilkins does not remain in the 18th century but draws parallels to our own day. His subjects remain models for liberals (in the eighteenth century meaning of the word) all around the world today, fighting for basic human liberties in both awful and wealthy places. Americans cannot help but be products of these men on some level, for all that we think of as American has in part been passed down through the hands and minds of these men. To understand his four Virginians is to begin to understand our own times, in both its marvelous ideals and its unfulfilled promises.

Waking from the Dream

Can we believe in America? The question reverbrates through the lives of many of us. Historian and civil rights activist Roger Wilkins answers with this book. It is a powerful, passionate and eloquent summary of Colonial Era race relations. Our Founding Fathers, indeed everyone in the book, is portrayed as tragically human with all the hope and horror and truimph that we are capable of.A keen psychological sense of motives and an empathic ear create a reading experience rarely had. Prejudiced readers, both white and black, will not be comforted by this book. The easy view of villians and victims that often corrupts our history into vulgar national mythology is not found here. In its place is a nuanced story interweaving ideology, military and political history, profiles of key players and refreshing personal reflections.If anything, it is Wilkin's experience as African-American man that propels his prose into the past to find an answer to the troubling question of loyalty. It is a question coiled around the heart of many people of color that with every new racial crisis, squeezes tighter. Using the telling details of a master historian, Wilkins points to the origins of racism in America through the words of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson, said his first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave riding horseback. At his death, the writer of the Declaration of Indepedence owned over a hundred human beings. He was not alone as many of our nation's Founding Fathers lived a life cushioned by slavery. Unstitching that pillow is Wilkins, rousing his readers from sleep by asking difficult questions. How can an African-American be a patriot to a nation that doubted her or his humanity? How could the Founding Fathers wax eloquent of freedom as a human right when they owned slaves? Can we believe in America?His answer is a terrifying and beautifal yes. He writes toward the end, "I have made speeches that reeked of hopelessness. People who have heard me in that mood sometimes ask how I manage to keep going. My answer is that my ancestors lift me up when I am low. Some of them never drew a free breath, and others very few of them. I try to live as if I am going to have meet them someday and answer the question "Boy, how did you use your freedom?"He answers the question of how can we believe in America with the deeper one of what did I do with my freedom? We have the freedom to create the America we want. We have this privelege because many struggled and died for it. Wilkin's book reminds us that the blood of that sacrifice came from everyone's ancestors and it has run together. It is a book of human decency and power, have the courage to read it.

Owning Up

This extraordinary volume shares the virtues of the men that provide its focus. It has the steady, right-thinking leadership of Washington. It has the learning and driving intensity of Madison. It has the cantankerous insistence on truthfulness of Mason. And it surely has much of the crafty elegance of Jefferson. With charity toward all and malice toward none, Wilkins manages the nearly impossible - a fully adult reflection on race and the American project. The issue of slavery and the founding fathers here is not the occasion for simple-minded evaluation and homiletics. It is the setting off point for a deep, careful, and powerful examination of the practical nature of political progress in the face of genuine human failing. Unflinching and realistic, mature and balanced, this book shames the shallowness of most public discourse and private apathy today, even as it honors the founding fathers with the respect of honest recognition. In one of the many extraordinary and too little known original writings this book reveals, George Mason wrote of slavery: "By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." Breaking slavery's chain of national calamity certainly requires today - as it did then - more than words. Yet through the words in this carefully crafted reflection, Wilkins opens the opportunity for us to own our own past as a nation - and that must certainly help compel and direct action.

The Founders' Reclaimed

In writing both economical and eloquent, Roger Wilkins reclaims the founders and patriotism for all Americans. Looking at the Virginia founders -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason -- Wilkins probes the the tension they lived between "earned guilt and aspiration to honor," between living privileged lives built on the horror of slavery, and calling forth a nation based on the proposition that "all men are created equal" and endowed with inalienable rights. Wilkins shows how blacks -- free and unfree -- played a major role in the revolution. With the perspective of a life devoted to making America better, he praises the founders for "their greatest legacy": a government "wrapped in the aura of freedom and limited by a devotion to rights" that created the field that allows each generation to work to extend freedom and equality. Wilkins probes the founders, neither airbrushing their flaws nor ignoring their genius. This is the testament of an honest and wise patriot. I recommend it highly.