Liberty & Slavery: The Paradox of America's Founding Fathers

Join us at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center April 11 at 6:30 p.m. for the premiere screening of Liberty & Slavery: The Paradox of America’s Founding Fathers—the next film in the Freedom Film Series.

Liberty & Slavery reveals the story of America’s Founding Fathers as young men who were yearning for a nation of individual liberty and unprecedented independence. Thomas Jefferson expressed this desire for freedom from England in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 by writing: “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.”

In composing this document, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues penned some of the most famous words ever written. The phrase: “all men are created equal” is one that every American child learns in school. Its message gives birth to the universal concepts of justice, equality and righteousness. But, the origins of America were seeded with a cruel paradox because many of the liberty-loving, Southern Founders were also slave owners including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison and Patrick Henry.

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