A few years into the future, when Notes was in active circulation, Benjamin Banneker, a Black farmer, surveyor, mathematician, and—notably—one of two people who delineated the boundaries of Washington, DC, responded to Jefferson’s racism in the now classic text: I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of Beings who have long laboured under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt, and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental
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