This I Believe

The Pursuit of Equality

I don’t even remember exactly where it was. Did I read it in an article, or was it a television report? I do remember the sense of outrage welling up inside me. My teeth clinched. It was a comment about Thomas Jefferson being a callous slave owner and the Declaration of Independence not really being a declaration that all people are created equal. I was already in my mid 30’s at the time but this comment launched me on a voyage of discovery through Jefferson’s papers and biographies.

I learned that for two weeks in June of 1776, Jefferson worked on a draft of The Declaration of American Independence. The ideas were drawn from a wide variety of writers. But it was Jefferson who transformed John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” into “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson understood the importance of making sure that the Declaration spoke to everyone – not just the privileged few. Then, in one powerful line, he advances a vision of a world where it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.”

In my business life I’d already witnessed the abuse of power by executives ruling over their subordinates. But here was Jefferson sitting down and creating a list of “intolerable offenses” committed by his CEO against equality. This included King George III’s position on slavery. Jefferson wrote, “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.”

Of course I also learned that a few days after finishing his draft, Jefferson’s fellow Congressmen voted to delete this passage from the final document. For the next 50 years of his life, when anyone asked Thomas Jefferson for a copy of the Declaration of Independence, he would provide the original draft with the deletions made by Congress noted.

I’ll never fully understand Jefferson’s decision to continue the family plantation and own slaves. Yet, while he chose to live within that economic system, he believed that citizens devoted to the pursuit of equality would one day invent an America and a world where equality was self-evident. In 1823, Frances Wright, a leading abolitionist, wrote to enlist Jefferson’s support for her plan to form America’s first racially integrated community. In his response, he claimed, “The abolition of the evil (slavery) is not impossible…Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried…”

When I open a can of coffee today I’m reminded of the fact that the price includes the meager wages of Ethiopian children living and dying under horrendous conditions. I wonder what future generations of Americans will think of the economic system in which I choose to live. I believe that the most important challenge that we all face in the 21st century is the pursuit of equality everywhere in the world.