Madison Hemings - Descendants

Descendants

The Hemingses' daughter Ellen Wayles Hemings married Andrew Jackson Roberts, a graduate of Oberlin College. They moved from Ohio to Los Angeles, California in the late 19th century with their first son Frederick, age six. Roberts founded the first black-owned mortuary there and became a civic leader in the community. Their son, Frederick Madison Roberts, named for his maternal grandfather, was first elected to the California legislature in 1918. He was re-elected and served for 16 years, becoming known as "dean of the assembly". He is believed to have been the first person of African-American ancestry elected to office west of the Mississippi River. Both he and his brother William Giles Roberts graduated from college. The Roberts descendants for generations have had a strong tradition of college education and public service.

"The experiences of descendants of both Madison and Eston Hemings illustrate the benefits and costs of passing for white. None of Madison Hemings's sons married. William Beverly Hemings served in a white regiment--the 73rd Ohio--in the Civil War and died alone in a Kansas veterans hospital in 1910. His brother James Madison Hemings seems to have slipped back and forth across the color line, and may be the source of stories among his sisters' descendants of a mysterious and silent visitor who looked like a white man, with white beard and blue eyes. Several of Madison Hemings's grandsons also passed for white, divorcing themselves from their sisters who stayed on the other side of the line.

Passing was not always permanent. Intermittent passing became a strategy for securing anything from a job to a haircut. Their racial identities calibrated by the day or hour, light-skinned members of the Hemings family were white in the workplace and black at home, or they borrowed a white surname to make a hairdressing appointment in a neighboring town."

Many of the Hemings' descendants who remained in Ohio were interviewed in the late twentieth century by two Monticello researchers as part of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's "Getting Word" project. It was to collect oral histories from among the descendants of slave families at Monticello; material has been added to the Monticello website. The researchers found that Hemings' descendants had married within the mixed-race community for generations, choosing light-skinned spouses of an educated class and identifying as people of color within the black community.

In 2010 Shay Banks-Young and Julie Jefferson Westerinen, descendants of Sally Hemings who identify as black and white, respectively, were honored together with David Works, a descendant of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, with the Search for Common Ground award for "their work to bridge the divide within their family and heal the legacy of slavery." They have been featured on NPR and in other interviews across the country.