Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

by Eli Saslow

In elementary school, Derek learned the version of Jefferson commonly taught in American history: his great egalitarianism, his famous phrasing in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” In his school textbook, Derek and his classmates read perhaps Jefferson’s most famous quote about black slaves, one that had been chiseled onto his monument in Washington, helping to inspire the civil rights movement. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” Jefferson famously said. But Don encouraged Derek to do a bit more digging about that statement, and eventually Derek found the rest of Jefferson’s quotation buried in an old white nationalist newsletter: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably.”