‘I wish he had done more to free enslaved people’: Thomas Jefferson’s descendant on his family’s complex legacy

Shannon LaNier, Jefferson’s sixth great-grandson, reflects on his lineage and the role of African Americans in the nation’s founding When the US turns 250 years old on Saturday, Shannon LaNier will be reckoning with a fundamental contradiction in its origin story – and his own. LaNier is the sixth great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, the founding father who wrote the Declaration of Independence and became the third president. Continue reading...

By David Smith in Washington