"As a black man, Roger Wilkins feels at times unwelcome in America. Although an outspoken participant in the civil rights movement, the assistant attorney general during the Johnson administration, and a Pulitzer Prize notable for his Watergate editorials, Wilkins has not always felt or been treated like a full American.".

"In Jefferson's Pillow, Wilkins returns to America's beginnings and the lives of the founding fathers to explore how, more than two hundred years after the establishment of this "great nation," race and slavery still impede our progress.

In a cogent analysis of the lives of George Washington, George Mason, James Madison, and of course Thomas Jefferson, he explores how class, education, and personality allowed for the institution of slavery in a nation conceived under the premise that "all men are created equal." He unravels how we as Americans tell our different sides of the story and the confounding ability of that narrative to limit who we are and who we can become."--BOOK JACKET.