Good day, friends. Welcome to this episode of listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.

My name is Nolan Johnson. I am your occasional co-host and producer of the program.

This week we have Dr. Cassandra, Newby, Alexander. Clay sits down with the professor of history from Norfolk State University in Virginia,

whose work has focused on African American history, public memory, and civic engagement.

Together, they take stock of where we are as a nation as we approach our 250th birthday.

They ask, what does freedom mean when it has not always been shared?

What does equality look like when the founding promise was never truly extended at all?

They begin with Jefferson's famous sentence,

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

It's a phrase we've come to revere, but did Jefferson mean what he wrote?

And Dr. Newby Alexander will take on that question.

How do we reconcile the poetry of those words with the reality that Jefferson and other founders enslaved people,

shaping a nation where race was not just a social division, but legal and an economic structure.

Should we hold the founders accountable, or is it more important to understand them in the full

context of their time. Jefferson himself once expressed

doubt that black and white Americans would ever live together as equals in a bi-racial

republic. Was he being honest or simply avoiding the moral consequences of his own choices because

he was not willing to give up the lifestyle that he lived.

This is an honest and thought-provoking exchange between Dr. Newby Alexander and Clay Jenkinson.

We appreciate her sharing her view of the past, the limits of historical memory,

and what the future could look like in Norfolk, Virginia,

and the rest of America.

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