James Wiley, a Tuskegee Airman, received a degree in physics from the University of Pittsburgh and wanted to be a scientist, but because of his race could only get a job as a chauffeur. He obtained his pilot’s license and went to the Tuskegee Institute, a “paradise,” as an instructor. After enlisting in 1942, he served in the famed 99th Pursuit Squadron of the Army Air Force, flew more than a hundred missions over southern Europe, and was awarded the Air Medal. In 1965, Colonel Wiley retired from “a wonderful military career” and then worked for fifteen years as a customer engineer with the Boeing Company. He and his wife, Ruby, raised three children.
Families
Jillian Atkin Sim
Jillian Sim, a writer and mother of two, was raised in the white world. Her grandmother, Ellen Love, an actress, told her many family stories heard from her mother, Anita Hemmings Love. She mentioned connections to Jefferson and an English sea captain, but never spoke of descent from enslaved people. Jill Sim learned of her African American ancestry only after her grandmother’s death in 1994. She published an account of her discovery in American Heritage, which tells the story of Anita Hemmings, who made headlines around the world in 1897 when it was revealed that she was passing for white at Vassar College.
Jill Sim believes, but cannot yet say with certainty, that she is descended from Elizabeth Hemings’s son Peter Hemings, a Monticello cook and brewer who worked as a tailor after he became free in 1827, purchased by a relative at the Monticello estate sale.
Yvonne Mitchell Simkins
Gloria Roberts
Gloria Roberts, daughter of Pearl Hinds and Frederick Madison Roberts, graduated from the University of Southern California and studied at the Juilliard School of Music. She lived most of her life in Europe, where she pursued a career as a concert pianist and accompanist, specializing in African American spirituals and the music of George Gershwin as well as European classical composers. She lived as a child in the household of her grandmother Ellen Hemings Roberts and remembers her well.
Patricia Roberts
Patricia Roberts, daughter of Pearl Hinds and Frederick Madison Roberts, attended business school at St. Louis University and returned to live in Los Angeles. After years in business and as an executive secretary and insurance agent, she took great pleasure in retirement as a teacher of young children.
Pearl Hinds Roberts
Pearl Hinds Roberts was the daughter of Lucy McKinney and Wiley Hinds, a former slave who left Arkansas in 1858 for the Central Valley of California. The Hinds family divided its time between Oakland and their large cattle ranch in Tulare County. Pearl Hinds studied music at the Boston Conservatory and Oberlin College, as well as with Fossett descendant Pauline Powell Burns in Oakland. For a time she headed the music department at what is now South Carolina State University.
In 1921 she married Frederick Madison Roberts, then a member of the California legislature. They lived in Los Angeles, where continued her musical career as organist and choir director in various churches. From 1942, she worked in retail—the first black salesperson in a downtown department store. Her watchword was, “If you have ideals, hang on to them despite disappointments.”
William A. Roberts
William G. Roberts
Robin Roberts-Martin
Three daughters of Consuelo and Elmer Wayles Roberts were interviewed together in Los Angeles: Paula Henderson, Robin Roberts-Martin, and Ellen Hodnett, a teacher and school principal. They recalled their father, a graduate of U.C.L.A., a mortician, and a probation officer. In 1976 he told Time magazine he thought Thomas Jefferson would be “unhappy about man’s inability to learn anything about living with his fellow man, despite all the advances in technology.”
The Roberts sisters had vivid memories of their grandfather William Giles Roberts, who ran the family mortuary before moving to his farm northeast of Los Angeles. They are proud of the Robertses as one of the earliest and most influential black families in Los Angeles. As for their Jefferson ancestry, the genetic tests of 1998 were “just a scientific confirmation of what we already knew.” As Paula Henderson said, “It was really important in the Roberts family that each person do something important. It didn’t matter who your relatives were if you didn’t do something yourself.”
Richard Rose
Virginia Craft Rose
Virginia Rose was the daughter of Elizabeth Letitia (Bessie) Trotter and Henry Kempton Craft, a Harvard graduate, electrical engineer, teacher, and YMCA executive. He was the grandson of William and Ellen Craft, famous for their daring escape from slavery in 1848. Bessie Trotter, who attended the New England Conservatory of Music, was the sister of the prominent civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter.
Virginia Rose attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduated from Barnard College, and did graduate work at Western Reserve University. She married Joshua Rose in 1934 and they moved to California, where he headed the Oakland branch of the YMCA. She passed her pride in her Trotter and Craft heritage along to their three children, who shared memories of cross-country car trips to keep up with their East Coast roots. Only late in life did Mrs. Rose begin to “ponder” her connection to the Fossetts of Monticello. As she said in 2006, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from.”
Jesse Scott
Jesse Scott, son of a Pamunkey Indian, was a violinist and dance band leader well known throughout Virginia. One contemporary recalled a dance at which Scott and his sons Robert and James formed the band: “Such music they made as the gods of Terpsichore will never hear again in this generation.” At the 1827 Monticello dispersal sale, Jesse Scott represented his wife’s family. He purchased his sister-in-law Edith Fossett and two of her children, so they would not be separated from their husband and father, Joseph Fossett.