Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg has said events named after US founding father Thomas Jefferson should be renamed because he was a slave owner.

The 2020 candidate said changing the title of his party’s annual dinner events – designated in honour of presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson – was “the right thing to do”.

Speaking on a nationally syndicated radio show, Mr Buttigieg was asked whether the Democrats’ Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed across the US because both were holders of slaves.

“Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do,” Mr Buttigieg told The Hugh Hewitt Show, referring to his home state.

“Over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honour,” he said, before saying he thought Jefferson’s legacy was particularly “problematic”.

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One of the founders of the Democratic party, the third US president was a Virginia plantation owner and is believed to have owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. Yet Jefferson also condemned the practice as a “moral depravity”.

“There’s a lot of course to admire in his thinking and his philosophy,” said Mr Buttigieg. “Then again if you plunge into his writings, especially the Notes on the State of Virginia, you know that he knew slavery was wrong – and yet he did it.”

The South Bend mayor insisted the renaming of events was not about “blotting him out of the history books or deleting him from being [one of] the founding fathers”, but was a question of which things you decided to honour.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), the 3rd President of the United States (Getty Images)

“The real reason I think there is a lot of pressure on this is the relationship between the past and present that we’re finding in a million different ways that racism isn’t some curiosity out of the past that we’re embarrassed about but moved on from,” the Democrat added.

“It’s alive, it’s well, it’s hurting people and it’s one of the main reasons to be in politics today is to try to change or reverse the harms that went along with that. We better look for ways to live out and honour that principle.”

Democratic party organisers in several states, including Georgia, Connecticut and Missouri, have removed the names of Jefferson and Jackson from their annual fundraising dinners – informally known as “JJs” – in recent years.