Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 African-American slaves throughout his adult life. Mizzou has no room for a racist slave owner on our campus, in the Quad, where thousands of black students  pass by everyday, forced to deal with imagery of the past in the future where we should be promoting equality, diversity and inclusion. A memorial of a racist has no place on out campus. The vast majority of these Confederate monuments were built during the era of Jim Crow laws (1877–1964). Detractors like us know that they were not built as memorials but as a means of intimidating African Americans and reaffirming white supremacy. According to historian Jane Dailey from University of Chicago, in many cases the purpose of the monuments was not to celebrate the past but rather to promote a "white supremacist future". Another historian, Karyn Cox, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has written that the monuments are "a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era". A historian from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, James Leloudis, stated that "The funders and backers of these monuments are very explicit that they are requiring a political education and a legitimacy for the Jim Crow era and the right of white men to rule."