Hakeem Jeffries’ Brother Helped Rewrite History at James Madison’s Montpelier to Focus on Slavery

Though President Trump is restoring federal sites dedicated to history back to promoting American pride and unity over woke ideological indoctrination, equally important historical landmarks operated privately by radical leftists continue to alter U.S history with critical race narratives that downplay the significant contributions of the nation’s founders. As the country’s 250th anniversary approaches this deserves to be reported, especially because one of the sites managed—and heavily impacted—by the left is James Madison’s Montpelier, the 2,650-acre property in northwestern Virginia that was home to the “Father of the Constitution” and fourth president of the United States. Rather than focus on Madison’s many accomplishments and multitude of political contributions—such as shaping the Constitution and the country—most of the Montpelier exhibits are centered on slavery and its “central role in framing of the nation” as well as its “lasting legacies,” an extensive report published by the Heritage Foundation a few years ago reveals. This is disgraceful and despite its historical significance Montpelier is not impacted by Trump’s 2025 executive order to reverse a yearslong “effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth” at national parks, museums, monuments and memorials.

Montpelier is a casualty of what the president’s order identifies as a “revisionist movement to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” Under the historical revision America’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. At Montpelier Madison’s legacy “has been effectively erased, as there are no exhibits dedicated to his significant contributions,” the comprehensive probe conducted by the conservative Washington D.C. think tank found. “Montpelier can now be counted among the ranks of projects and actors that promote a distorted view of American history, suffused with critical race theory (CRT).” Madison’s signal contributions to the founding of America are seriously downplayed and there is no genuine focus on Madison the political philosopher and statesman or written displays dedicated to his many acts of public service. His drafting of the Bill of Rights is barely mentioned and with few small exceptions all the galleries and exhibits at Montpelier focus on slavery and Jim Crow. “The visitor is left with the impression that slavery was the central animating force behind the laws and economy of the United States,” the Heritage report concludes, adding that there is a palpable lack of education about Madison’s ideas and contributions to the American Republic.

The woke transformation occurred because the radical left, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) which features conservative organizations on a catalogue of “hate groups,” is running the historical site. The chairman of the Montpelier Foundation that operates the landmark is Hasan Kwane Jeffries, brother of New York Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader. Hasan teaches courses on Black Power Movement and civil rights at Ohio State University and consults regularly with school districts on developing anti-racism programming, according to his biography. His areas of expertise include African American history, race, ethnicity, power and culture and he helped the SPLC develop a history framework for elementary and high schools that claims, “slavery is our country’s origin.” Hasan also hosts a podcast produced by the SPLC, a leftwing nonprofit that labels legitimate groups that disagree with it on social issues hateful. In 2013 a domestic terrorist who carried out a politically motivated shooting at the Family Research Council, a pro-life nonprofit, got his target list from the SPLC catalogue of “hate groups.”

The Montpelier Foundation’s vice chair, Leslie Alexander, is a specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history who is responsible for a project called “How We Got Here: Slavery and the Making of the Modern Police State,” which examines how surveillance of free and enslaved black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras laid the foundation for policing today. “Despite growing public awareness that mass incarceration has its roots in slavery, and that racial bias infects all aspects of our criminal justice system, our nation has yet to reckon with the reality that contemporary systems of policing and mass criminalization have powerful, significant histories that originated in white fear—not merely of Black people, but also of Black resistance and the very notion of Black freedom,” Alexander claims. Her research appears in the 1619 Project, a highly controversial initiative launched by a mainstream newspaper that aims to reframe the country’s history by placing slavery and anti-black racism at the center of the national narrative, asserting that they are foundational to the institutions of the United States. A key figure in the 1619 Project, civil rights journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, has also falsely depicted the American Revolution as a pro-slavery cause.