Phillis Wheatley's existence was dangerous to an idea the U.S. was founded on.

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[msethstewart]

This would be a good video I'd want to share with my students if the presenter didn't weirdly - and very disrespectfully - call her "Phillis" throughout. Jefferson and the other men get the respect of being called by their last name, but she's called Phyllis. It's gross. I see this in student essays -- they'll contrast the poems of "Whitman" and "Emily" -- but I expect better from the Washington Post.

[ReevansElectro]

No one race has a monopoly on any of the virtues or traits desirable for mankind. We are not identical and yet have equal capacity for intellect among the races. It is incumbent on us to hone those qualities with an education that is both of the physical properties of the world and the arts.

[starcherry]

What a remarkable woman!!
I wish I had learned about her in school

[darlenefarmer]

Great information. Ref to genealogy, Wheatly's only child died...and she died soon after. No descendants from her line. Sad that this history is not taught in American History...IT SHOULD BE!

[rosejohnson-tsosie]

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." Thomas Jefferson
I guess Tommy was swimming with the current.

[MsTishalish]

The duplicity of Thomas Jefferson being against Phillis Wheatley while preying on Sally Hemings and authoring and publishing the Declaration of Independence is not unmissed.

[chauncie]

False. Jupiter Hammon was the first Black person to publish any writing in the US

[tonysienzant]

Your entire analysis is based on 'systemic racist' tropes & should not be taken seriously for its historic omissions, some of which I described in a prior comment.

At the time of the Revolutionary War, there was broad intellectual & philosophical debate about whether blacks were somehow 'inferior' by being a 'different breed of man, ' as evidenced by their tribal culture that did not advance to an agrarian one with agriculture, as developed in Egypt hundreds of years before them, not to mention the next phase of civilization with the Industrial Revolution. So, there were whites like Wheatley's owners who believed that blacks could be educated & assimilated into Western Culture, plenty of them in fact, a preponderance of them being in the northern states. And there were whites who held the opposing viewpoint.(Think of it as an issue like abortion is today, with the population about evenly split on its lawfulness.)

And remember, this was at a time when the science of human evolution was not yet completely understood, with the knowledge we have today, so it could have very well been that different races came from different 'species' of the human family, with different strengths & weaknesses.

For you (& your Woke ideology) to reduce Wheatley's history to a cartoon caricature of reality by stating that the entire white power structure was 'racist' against the black man is ignorant & laughable. I hope most viewers have the intellectual honesty to see through your distortions of American History.