Monday on Fox News Channel’s “FOX & Friends” President George W Bush former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said tearing down monuments and statues to historical figures who owned slaves is “sanitizing history.”
Partial transcript as follows:
KILMEADE: As an African-American woman, do you see yourself in this constitution? Do you think that, when we look at nine of our first twelve presidents as slave owners, should we start taking their statues down and say, we’re embarrassed by you?”
RICE: I’m a firm believer keep your history before you. So I don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to look at the names and recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history. When you start wiping out history, sanitizing history to make you feel better, it’s a bad thing. But let me say one thing about our constitution, that constitution originally counted my answers as 3/5 of a man. In 1952 my father had trouble registering to vote in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2005, I stood in the Ben Franklin room, one of our founders, I took an oath of office to the same constitution, and it was administered by Jewish woman Supreme Court justice. That is the story of America. The long road to freedom has indeed been long. It has sometimes been violent. It had many martyrs but ultimately has been Americans claiming those institutions for themselves and expanding the definition of ‘We the People.’
KILMEADE: Does it make you think less, should we think less of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson because they were slave owners?
RICE: They were people of their times. I wish they had been like John Adams who did not believe in slavery. I wish they had been like Alexander Hamilton, who was an immigrant, by the way, a child of questionable parentage from the Caribbean. I wish all of them had been like that. Jefferson in particular, a lot of contradictions in Jefferson. They were people from their time. We should celebrate the from the Jeffersons, Washingtons, slave owners, look where we are now.
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