KING: No President who ever owned human beings should be honored

 From 1914 to 1918 during World War I, Adolph Hitler was a decorated and successful soldier in the German military. Later as Germany's leader, he developed one of the most effective anti-smoking campaigns in the world. Under his rule, Germany revolutionized the jet engine.

But you know, and I know, that those facts don't mean a damn thing. He was a monster of a human being. Millions of people were targeted and killed by his regime in one of the most horrific periods in human history. He was a hateful anti-Semitic bigot. Next year he'll still be a monster. In 2050, he'll still be a monster. Hundreds of years from now, he'll still be a monster.

Adolph Hitler is a monster who should never be honored.

Just as this is true for Hitler, it is true for any American President who ever owned human beings and forced them into a life of slavery. The Holocaust and slavery are each an unjust disgrace.

Under every single circumstance, American slavery was an abomination. Being forced into a life of unconditional labor, torn apart from your loved ones as they were sold all over the place, unable to ever leave or move on, often molested and used for breeding or sexual pleasure, and denied the most basic human and civil rights — slavery was terrible. Anyone who says otherwise is poorly informed.

While it may have been legal in this nation, it was always horrific. Its legality and its morality have nothing to do with each other. Anyone who sustained slavery was grossly inhumane and immoral. From the beginning of the system until the very end, good people always objected and refused to participate. It was an optional choice to own human beings. Those who chose to own people were monsters.

Refusing to allow a person to leave your property makes you a monster.

Forcing women to have sex with you makes you a monster.

Forcing strangers to have sex with one another for the purpose of breeding makes you a monster.

George Washington owned human beings.

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Whipping or beating people as a form of punishment makes you a monster.

Putting a price on a person's life by buying or selling them makes you a monster.

Ripping families apart as they are bought and sold for profit makes you a monster.

Forcing people to work for free makes you a monster.

I could go on. Slavery was a monstrous system. Everybody who participated in it was evil for having done so. Period. No exceptions.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade to African-Americans is the Holocaust to Jews. No justification will ever be acceptable.

Today, Donald Trump is going out of his way to honor President Andrew Jackson. He should never be honored. Over his lifetime his family owned at least 300 human beings. This is terrible and no contribution he made in his life will ever outweigh this fact. To this very day, Andrew Jackson's own estate openly admits that the key source of his wealth came from owning human beings and forcing them to work on his plantation. At the time Jackson died, he owned about 150 people. He was a full-fledged unrepentant bigot. The enslaved Africans on his plantation were often whipped and beaten. If they escaped, fugitive squads searched for them and returned them back to the plantation. One advertisement put out by Jackson for a runaway slave offered $10 for every 100 lashes given to the slave who was caught.

Is that not sick to you?

This makes Andrew Jackson a monster. Nothing he did as President of the United States is good enough to look past this.

The same holds true for every single American President who owned human beings. All of them. They include:

George Washington

Thomas Jefferson

James Madison

James Monroe

Andrew Jackson

Martin Van Buren

William Henry Harrison

John Tyler

James Polk

Zachary Taylor

Andrew Johnson

Ulysses S. Grant

Those twelve men who owned human beings represent over 25% of all American presidents. Each of those men have long, awful lists of the horrible stories of the men, women, and children they forced into bondage. The act of forcing a human being into slavery alone is awful all by itself, but each of the hundreds and hundreds of enslaved Africans forced into slavery by them had their own stories of cruel abuse.

The twelve men who owned human beings represent over 25% of all American presidents. Thomas Jefferson (pictured) was one of them.

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And, to be clear, those twelve presidents, which went from the first president to the eighteenth president, were intermingled with presidents who refused to own human beings.

John Adams, the second president, refused. The next several presidents owned human beings, but John Quincy Adams — Adams' son and the sixth president — also refused.

Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln never owned human beings, historical research shows. All of those men had presidents before and after them who did. The point is this — it was optional. Those who participated in such an evil practice did so by choice.

It is telling that this nation is still so willing to honor these men. Just like Hitler, they do not deserve it.