Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
John Quill Taylor King was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Alice Woodson, a teacher, and John Quill Taylor, a doctor. When his mother remarried after his father’s death, he took the surname of his stepfather, Charles King, a funeral director. King graduated from Fisk University in 1941 and then entered the U.S. Army. He retired from the Army Reserves as a Major General.
General King, who had numerous degrees, taught mathematics at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, and served as its longest-standing president from 1965 to 1988. In retirement he ran the family mortuary. He and his wife, Marcet Alice Hines, also a college teacher, had three children, two of whom became physicians. General King admired his great-aunt, Minerva Jane Woodson, a teacher who was his main source for much of the Woodson family history. As he said, when explaining the Woodson urge to excel, “Failure was not a word in our family.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Nancy Harriet Lee, daughter of Mary Elizabeth Butler and Thomas F. Lee, was raised in Bloomingburg, OH. She attended the University of Pittsburgh, intending to be a teacher, but could not fulfill her requirement as a practice teacher because of racial quotas. After this “shocking experience,” she turned instead to social work, ultimately obtaining a master’s degree. She rose high in the Juvenile and the Domestic Relations court systems in Pittsburgh, becoming the first black supervisor in the former. She received numerous community awards and led the drive to fund Pitt’s African Heritage Classroom. She was inspired by Mary McLeod Bethune’s principle, “Each one help one” and once said, “That’s the way we always were as a family, helping each other.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by Andrew Davenport -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Tucker Isaacs, son of German Jewish merchant David Isaacs and Nancy West, a free woman of color, was remembered by one Charlottesville resident as “a good citizen and much respected.” He played a central role in the development of the town’s main street, constructing brick buildings on land he owned.
Isaacs and his wife, Ann-Elizabeth Fossett, moved with her parents to Ohio in 1838, returning after several years to Charlottesville, where relatives remained in slavery. In 1850 Tucker Isaacs was arrested for forging free papers for his enslaved brother-in-law, Peter Fossett. After the charges were dropped, Isaacs and his family sold their property, returned to Ohio, and bought a 158-acre farm in Ross County, still remembered as a station on the Underground Railroad. Isaacs once tested a civil rights law in a hostile Ohio community. His grandson William Monroe Trotter wrote of his “brave devotion to liberty and equality.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by Andrew Davenport -
Edna Jacques grew up in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Howard University, with a master’s degree in mathematics. She was the first minority hired by IBM in Philadelphia and achieved further “firsts” for women and minorities in her thirty years at the company. She grew up listening to stories of her Bolling and Hemmings ancestors told by her great-aunt Olive Rebecca Bolling (1847–1953). She heard of the beauty of the Hemmingses and the accomplishments of her great-grandfather Samuel P. Bolling (1819–1900), who was born a slave. After the Civil War Bolling had large landholdings and a thriving brickyard, and served in the Virginia House of Delegates. An active Daughter of the American Revolution, Edna Jacques successfully nominated her ancestor Mary Hemings Bell as a DAR Patriot.
Today’s Daughters (.pdf)
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Beverly Jefferson, the youngest child of Eston Hemings and Julia Isaacs Jefferson, lived as an African American in southern Ohio until the age of eleven, when his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, changed their surname from Hemings to Jefferson, and thereafter lived as white people. Until 1872 Beverly Jefferson worked in the hotel business, becoming a very popular hotel proprietor after the Civil War. Thereafter he focused on what became the Jefferson Transfer Company, the leading carriage and omnibus firm in the capital. Long obituaries followed the death of this “well known and prominent citizen of Madison.”
Beverly Jefferson and his wife, Anna Maud Smith, had five sons, who included graduates of the University of Wisconsin, a lawyer, and a physician. He apparently spoke of his descent from Thomas Jefferson only to close friends. Long after his death, his grandsons altered the family history to erase the connection to the Hemings family. Present-day descendants had no knowledge of their African American heritage until the 1970s.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Eston Hemings was the youngest son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Eston Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle, John Hemmings, and became free in 1829, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. He and his brother Madison left Monticello to live in the town of Charlottesville with their mother, Sally Hemings. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1832, Eston Hemings married a free woman of color, Julia Ann Isaacs. About 1838 they sold their property and moved to Chillicothe, OH, where Hemings led a very successful dance band. He was remembered as “a master of the violin, and an accomplished ‘caller’ of dances.”
At mid-century Eston and Julia Hemings and their three children, John Wayles, Anna, and Beverly, left Ohio for Wisconsin, changing their surname to Jefferson and living henceforth as white people. They settled in the capital, Madison, where Eston Jefferson pursued his trade as a cabinetmaker. A 1998 study genetically linked his male descendants with male descendants of the Jefferson family.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Isaac Jefferson’s father, George Granger, was the only enslaved man to serve as Monticello overseer, while his mother, Ursula Granger, was a particularly trusted household servant. Trained in metalworking, including apprenticeship to a Philadelphia tinner, Isaac Granger worked in the Monticello blacksmith shop and nail factory, and briefly operated a tin shop.
He, his wife, Iris, and their sons Squire and Joyce became the property of Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph in the late 1790s. In the 1820s Granger gained his freedom and moved to Petersburg, VA, where he practiced his trade as a blacksmith until his death.
Isaac Granger, who adopted the surname Jefferson toward the end of his life, was known in Petersburg for his stories of life at Monticello. His vivid recollections were taken down by Charles Campbell in the 1840s, but not published until 1951, along with a striking daguerreotype of the blacksmith. Campbell noted that Isaac Jefferson “bore a good character.”
