Most may not know that though Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, he was anti-slavery. Even less probably know that despite being anti-slavery, he was also anti-integration. How does that work? Well, Jefferson’s original plan for emancipation (outlined in his only book, Notes on the State of VA) was to build a “second” America in Africa for blacks to inhabit. It would have everything the “original” America had it would just be governed and populated exclusively by blacks while receiving infinite US federal funding. What’s perhaps most surprising still is the prophetic reason why he proposed this instead of regular emancipation:

“It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

• Thomas Jefferson 1785