This week, Philadelphia's National Constitution Center opened its newest exhibit, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello, which examines six enslaved families who lived and worked at Jefferson's plantation by displaying and explaining artifacts, documents and interviews with descendants. The exhibit opened Wednesday, April 9, and lasts until Oct. 19, 2014. 

The exhibit was developed by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, Jefferson's plantation in Virginia, in partnership with the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) which is set to open its facility in Washington, D.C., next year. 

The exhibit opens by contextualizing the issue of slavery before moving into the daily lives and lineage of the families who lived and worked on Jefferson's plantation, building an environment to try to understand how a man who wrote that "all men are created equal" could justify claiming ownership over so many men, women and children. The larger question that the exhibit addresses is how a country could fight for liberty and justice while instituting a system of  injustice—a system of slavery. 

The exhibit provides insights into the hypocrisies and intricacies of early America. Jefferson often separated enslaved family members, husbands and wives, on extended stays in Philadelphia and elsewhere, while preaching liberty. In his will, Jefferson freed just five enslaved individuals out of hundreds. Joseph Fossett, one of those five, became a free man while his family was sold and separated to different buyers. It took Fossett more than two decades to buy back his family and reunite his children. 

One of the most powerful parts of the exhibit are the hundreds of names behind a statue of the still-praised and idolized Jefferson. 

"Who Jefferson was, what Jefferson accomplished, is wrapped up and tied up and tangled up in a population of somewhere near 600 enslaved men, women and children who were a fundamental part of his world," Rex Ellis, co-curator of the exhibit from the NMAAHC, explained at the exhibits' preview. "In order to understand Jefferson, you must understand the period in which he lived and you must give voice to those of them who surrounded him because they represented a community who brought him to his father on a pillow when he was born to those who adjusted the pillow on his head when he died."

The exhibit not only details the lives of the families, their trades and their everyday objects, both simple and extraordinary, but also provides oral testimony from descendants of those in their ancestry who fought for the inalienable freedom that Jefferson wrote about decades, and even centuries, before.