Jefferson's Pillow: the Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism.

By Roger Wilkins. (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, c. 2001. Pp. 163. $23.00, ISBN 0-8070-0956-3.)

Roger Wilkins is not a conventional academic, and Jefferson's Pillow is not a conventional scholarly book. Wilkins, who teaches history at George Mason University, came late to the academy after a distinguished career as a public servant and journalist, and he has devoted his life to fighting for human and civil rights. He uses the image of the young Thomas Jefferson being carried on a pillow by a slave to open up basic questions about the place of slavery in the history of the United States and to explain how the answers to those questions inform his sense of himself as a patriotic black American. Wilkins centers his reflections on four slaveholding Founders--Jefferson, George Mason, George Washington, and James Madison--but he does not offer "yet another ... colonial or revolutionary history" (p. 7). Instead, he tries to understand the place of these men in American history and culture in order to come to grips with their achievements and their failures; Wilkins also seeks to determine whether he can see himself and his "ancestors as active participants in a history from which [they] are too often absent" (p. 7).

The first three chapters of the book retell the story of the colonial struggle for independence and trace the ensuing political battles through Washington's administration. Wilkins evaluates the lives and political choices of each of these four Founders to understand their contributions. He persistently asks how those choices were related to the Founders' status as slaveholders. In the final chapter he relates this discussion to black citizenship in modern America.

Wilkins uncovers no new material when answering these questions, nor does he present novel interpretations of the founding. He offers instead a moving personal meditation on the connections between the way he understands the past and the obligations that he feels in the present. Wilkins rejects a prosecutorial stance toward the slaveholding Founders, opting to see their deeply unfortunate compromises and their tragic blindnesses within a context that takes seriously their more admirable aspirations and accomplishments. He does not excuse the Founders' failures. He insists that we confront their addiction to the racist privileges of their culture, but that we do so while asking whether we, like Wilkins himself, are "addicted, like the founding fathers," to our own "privileges and their convenience" (p. 138). His pointed but humane evaluation of colonial and Revolutionary American history inspires him to "keep on being an active American reveling in the struggle that is both my life and, after my ancestors, my most precious American legacy" (p. 147). Wilkins's ability to find inspiration in the Revolution has something to say to those of us more inclined to cynicism in the face of the founding generation's racism.

JAMES SIDBURY
University of Texas at Austin