Most American presidents have not welcomed the opportunity to discuss race. After all, talking about it unearths the history of American slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the history of racial inequality.

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The original conversation on race

Although President Bill Clinton is famously tagged with starting the idea of a “national conversation on race,” in his 1997 commencement address at the University of California-San Diego, American presidents have long had to address the issue. From Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia on forward, the question of race has been at the heart of how Americans might reconcile American democracy with systematic racial inequality. And for much of our history, their ideas have come well short of freedom and equity.

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The civil rights era leadership of the Executive Branch

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower was president when Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, and when Emmett Till’s killers were freed after a quick show trial in Mississippi in 1955. Eisenhower seemed to try his best not to take a stand on the movement, and even refused the answer the telegram sent by Mamie Till, mother of the slain teenager, “pleading that [he] personally see that justice is meted out… in the beastly lynching of [her] son.”

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JFK paves the way

The groundbreaking and turbulent events of 1963, particularly the young activists of Birmingham, Alabama who faced down the fire hoses and police dog attacks ordered by Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety “Bull” Connor, finally pushed Kennedy to speak out. In his speech 50 years ago last month, Kennedy argued that civil rights should be thought of as part of the broader American struggle for freedom. Reminding Americans that while our armed forces were not “whites only” institutions, Kennedy insisted “it ought to be possible… for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color.”

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Few in today’s political climate felt like it was a good time for President Obama to talk about race following the not guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman. But the protests and profound disappointment in the wake of the verdict has created a national divide he clearly felt compelled to address.

Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery his whole life. Calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.

At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition. In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories. But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.

Although Jefferson continued to advocate for abolition, the reality was that slavery was only becoming more entrenched. The slave population in Virginia skyrocketed from 292,627 in 1790 to 469,757 in 1830. Jefferson had assumed that the abolition of the slave trade would weaken slavery and hasten its end. Instead, slavery only became more widespread and profitable. To try to erode Virginians’ support for slavery, he discouraged the cultivation of crops heavily dependent on slave labor—tobacco—and encouraged the introduction of crops that needed little or no slave labor—wheat, sugar maples, short-grained rice, olive trees, and wine grapes. But by the 1800s, Virginia’s most valuable commodity and export was neither crops nor land, but slaves.