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Today, that slave's grandson teaches at the the university founded by slave-owner Thomas Jefferson in Virgina, teaching young Americans about the modern-day struggle for human liberty.

That struggle has its roots in Jefferson's words more than his deeds, and its parallel's in my grandfather's membership in a transcendent generation - that body of black women and men born in the 19^th Century in servitude, freed from slavery by the Civil War, determined to make their way as free women and men.

My students are modern young men and women, filled with all the cynicism and despair of their age.