More than 50 years ago, students at what was then known as George Mason College decided to do what everybody seemed to do in the ’60s—buck the establishment.
The students decided to skip celebrating Founder’s Day, which was then celebrated on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday as the college was a part of University of Virginia, and focus instead on the college’s namesake, George Mason IV. The celebration became Mason Day, planned this year for Friday, April 22.
It’s appropriate that a day bearing his name was started by a group going against the norm; Mason himself was a bucker of norms.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason IV was instrumental in writing, passed into law 240 years ago this May and included protections for freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to trial by jury. It also prohibited unwarranted search and seizure.
In 1789, the Virginia stateman rejected the U.S. Constitution as it was written, because it didn’t address individual rights. The Virginia Declaration of Rights later became the basis for the U.S. Bill of Rights.
And that wasn’t the only thing he rejected.
“He wanted an immediate end to the international slave trade,” said Mason University Professor Rosemarie Zagarri. “But he wanted protections for slavery within the United States.”
Mason felt that slavery was wrong in some ways, Zagarri said, but like many in his day, his wealth was tied up in the ownership of slaves.
Mason realized ending international slave trade would be good for Virginians, who had a healthy, self-sustaining population of slaves that could be sold to slave owners in the deep South and the Caribbean who needed more slaves to work their lands.
“He wasn’t willing to free his slaves. He had nine children [and] that was a part of their inheritance. He was uncomfortable with it, but he didn’t agonize about it,” she said.
That dichotomy permeates Zagarri’s Reading in History Honors course on “George Mason in History and Memory.”
“That how I try to teach Mason to my students; he’s a complicated guy,” Zagarri said. “He’s really worth having as the university’s namesake, but we need to realize his limitations as well as his contributions.”