Week 3-Tues- Passing for White - Family Legends as “literature”- Class Notes

Jefferson and mixed-race “daughter” Harriet (Mother, Sally Hemings)

An oil miniature with an inscription of Harriet Hemings, daughter of Sally Hemings and Jefferson. As such, Harriet was the niece of Martha Jefferson, his late wife.

No known image of Sally Hemings exists to our knowledge.

 Some Hemings descendants could “pass” for white

Jefferson descendants “passing for white” in 1830s

Three of Sally Hemings's children passed permanently into the white world.  Her son Beverly and daughter Harriet left Monticello with Jefferson's consent in their early twenties.

Here is Beverly Jefferson (older male), his grandson Carl and great-grandson,William Jefferson (baby).

Madison Hemings’s great-grandson Irvin Young (1889-1961), with his wife Ada.

Madison Hemings (Sally’s son) identified as a person of color.  Over the generations, some of his descendants like Irvin resorted to either permanent or intermittent passage across the color line.

Sometimes they did not tell their own children.

Some descendants now “white”
                didn’t know about passing

Julia Jefferson Westerinen did not learn of her connection to Monticello and her African American ancestry until the 1970s. "It was the family legend“.

Sally’s son Eston Hemings, freed in Jefferson's will, married and took his family to Ohio in the late 1830s. 

At midcentury, they moved to Wisconsin, where they changed both their name—to Jefferson—and their racial identity. 

While Eston H. Jefferson's descendants prospered, they learned that passing has costs as well as benefits, because of separation from family and community and the persistent anxiety of hiding the past.

                Lucille Roberts Balthazar

Lucille Balthazar, only three generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello, heard of her connection to Jefferson from her father, William Giles Roberts.

She remembers a mysterious white man who visited her grandmother Ellen Hemings Roberts.

Also, her grandmother Ellen Hemings Roberts often prepared food for her blond, blue-eyed brother Billy [William Glenn Roberts].

                George (Jack) Pettiford insists on serving with blacks      in WW II

George (Jack) Pettiford’s moment of truth came when he was inducted into the Navy in World War II. 

When an official tried to put him in a white unit, he insisted that he serve with other blacks. 

As his widow, Jacqueline Pettiford, remembered, he kept being pushed toward the white side and had to keep going back to the black side, saying, ‘This is my line.  I want to be what I am.’

                Patricia Roberts

Madison Hemings’s great-granddaughter Patricia Roberts was often questioned about her ethnicity and some people suggested, “You don't have to be black, you could be whatever you want.” 

Under no circumstance did she ever consider passing for white, she said.  “That was the way we were brought up, to take pride in who we were.” 

Almost without exception, Hemings descendants were proud to say, “I am black.”