Ward on Words

The hero's name was Jefferson Thomas . He was 68 when he died of pancreatic cancer on Sunday. He was a true American hero. He was a hero because as a teenager, he was one of the Little Rock 9. One of the very brave teenagers who stood up to segregation. Stood up to racism. Stood up to hatred. In 1957, he and eight other students required the National Guard to protect them as they did what so many students take for granted today: they showed up for high school. In those days, schools were segregated. "Separate but equal." Blacks legally barred from attending school with whites. Mr. Thomas worked to change that. It could not have been easy to have been on the front lines of the war to integrate schools. But Mr. Thomas and eight other high school students took a risk to take a stand for equality. He was the almost namesake of another advocate of freedom, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and who was also a slaveholder in Virginia. Fran...

He wrote a revolutionary document with the express intention of explaining why a colony an ocean away from the sovereign state was going "to dissolve political bands which have connected them with another..." In doing so, he defined a new world order, a world where "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Of course, I am speaking of Thomas Jefferson. With the Fourth of July looming just ahead, it's a good time to take a look at the remarkable American who gave us The Declaration of Independence while a rebellious British subject - and the Louisiana Territories as the president of a new nation. Jefferson is our Plato - our philosopher king - the man who viewed the world from high on his mountaintop perch at Monticello. President Kennedy once told an assembly of Nobel laureates that it w...