‘I wish he had done more to free enslaved people’: Thomas Jefferson’s descendant on his family’s complex legacy

Shannon LaNier poses at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History exhibit Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty, in Washington DC in January 2012. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

When the US turns 250 years old on Saturday, Shannon LaNier will be reckoning with a fundamental contradiction in its origin story – and his own.

LaNier is the sixth great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, the founding father who wrote the Declaration of Independence and became the third president.