On Sept. 30, 1941, Andrews was one of seven commissioners who attended the private meeting at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art to decide which words would be etched into four massive panels at the Jefferson Memorial.
At a pivotal moment in the gathering, Andrews made his proposal to exclude words taken from Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Andrews’s rationale was that Jefferson never meant that Black people were created equal with White people.
“At the time this was written into the Declaration of Independence we had slavery,” Andrews said, according to the meeting’s self-described “confidential” minutes, which The Washington Post reviewed at the personal archives of two commission members. “No one could assume that the great Anglo Saxons as were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were created equal with the poor savage, without clothes, that had come out of Africa.”
In a raw appeal to segregationists on the commission, Andrews warned what could happen to American society at that moment if the memorial included the idea that all men are created equal.
“We are going to have trouble, I am afraid, here in Washington by reason of the thought among the worst element of both races,” he said. “We face that situation now and all they have to do is for people to feel that they have been ill-treated and they are entitled to the same accommodations at hotels and the same room with you, etc., and eat with you at the same table. Then they read that and it is misleading to them and they are not to blame.”
The other commissioners did not object to the tone of Andrews’s remarks.
Instead, Kean, then 81 years old, led the way in agreeing with Andrews’s characterization of Jefferson’s view on race: “I would say that I entirely agree with him that the author and signers of the Declaration did not have in mind Indians or Negroes, or other persons than the British subjects for which they had the right to speak.”
But after considering the idea of deleting “all men are created equal” from the memorial, Kean and other commissioners worried about the backlash if they left out one of the most famous phrases in American history — and the one most associated with Jefferson. Kean vigorously opposed the idea and Kimball said, “We can get in more trouble if we leave it out.”
Andrews grudgingly conceded the point, saying, “I am rather afraid there would be a lot of questions asked and a lot of things about it, maybe articles written about it, and we are so used to seeing that expression that nobody pays any attention to it anyway.”