Lose Your Mother

Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Tall About Our Past

By Annette Gordon Reed

“Sally Hemings has been described as “an enigma,” the enslaved woman who first came to public notice at the turn of the 19th century when James Callender, an enemy of the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson, wrote with racist virulence of “SALLY,” who lived at Monticello and had borne children by Jefferson. Hemings came back into the news earlier this year, after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced plans to restore a space where Hemings likely resided, for a time, at Monticello. A number of news reports as well as comments on social media discussing the plans drew the ire of many readers because they referred to Hemings as Jefferson’s “mistress” and used the word “relationship” to describe the connection between the pair, as if those words inevitably denote positive things. They do not, of course — especially when the word “mistress” is modified by the crucial word ‘enslaved.'”

“George Washington, Slave Catcher”

By Erica Armstrong Dunbar

“Washington almost made it through his two terms in office without a major incident involving his slave ownership. On a spring evening in May of 1796, though, Ona Judge, the Washingtons’ 22-year-old slave woman, slipped away from the president’s house in Philadelphia. At 15, she had joined the Washingtons on their tour of Northern living. She was among a small cohort of nine slaves who lived with the president and his family in Philadelphia. Judge was Martha Washington’s first attendant; she took care of Mrs. Washington’s personal needs.”

“A Database of Fugitive Slave Ads Reveal Thousands of Untold Resistance Stories”

“Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. The notice described her in detail as a “light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair,” as well as her skills at mending clothes, and that she “may attempt to escape by water … it is probable she will attempt to pass as a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage.” She did indeed board a ship called the Nancy and made it to New Hampshire, where she later married a free black sailor, although she was herself never freed by the Washingtons and remained a fugitive.”

“In 1838, the Jesuit priests who managed Georgetown University rescued it from debt by selling the enslaved ancestors of people like Joseph M. Stewart. In 2016, Stewart sat down in an auditorium at Georgetown to watch its leaders tell the world how they planned to make amends. Their message left Stewart, a retired food-industry executive, feeling brushed aside.”

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Welcome to History of Black America!

History of Black Americais an introduction to African American history, covering periods from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the present. The objective of the course is to assess watershed periods, such as Slavery in Colonial and Antebellum America, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration and World War I; the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and Civil Rights and the Black Power movements.