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.”
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.”
Betsy Hemmings (the surname is spelled with two m’s by Betsy and her descendants) was born at Monticello in 1783, daughter of Mary Hemings and an unidentified father. According to her family’s oral history, her father was Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson’s son-in-law John Wayles Eppes was the father of her children.
As an infant Hemmings was taken to live with Thomas Bell, a respected white merchant in Charlottesville, to whom her mother had been hired while Jefferson was in France. Thomas Bell and Mary Hemings later had two children together and lived together in what their neighbors came to consider a common-law marriage. When Mary Hemings asked to be sold to Bell in 1792, Jefferson consented, agreeing to sell with her only “such of her younger children as she chose.” Nine-year-old sister Betsy and her twelve-year-old brother Joe Fossett returned to live in bondage at Monticello, while their mother and younger half-siblings became free and inherited Bell’s estate.
In 1797, at age fourteen, Hemmings was once again forced to leave Monticello and her family after Jefferson gave her to his daughter Maria and her husband John Wayles Eppes as part of their marriage settlement. When Maria died in 1804, Hemmings was relocated a further time when Eppes moved with his young son Francis Wayles Eppes to Millbrook, in Buckingham County, Virginia, where he and his second wife, Martha Burke Jones, lived and had four children.
Because she lived and died in bondage and because the Buckingham County records burned in 1869, it has not been possible to learn the names of all of Betsy Hemmings’s own children. However, her descendants (including Edna Jacques, pictured above) have not forgotten their connection to her. Their family stories and those of descendants of John and Martha Jones Eppes shed light on the close ties of family as well as the separations of slavery that must have been felt by Betsy Hemmings. They tell of her distress when some of her children were taken by Francis Eppes to Florida in 1828,
When Betsy Hemmings died in 1857 at age seventy-three, the Eppes family commissioned an elaborate grave marker for her adjacent to that of John Wayles Eppes, who had died in 1823. The two markers, so similar and so near, do nothing to dispel the stories of her relationship with Eppes and his family. As a testament to the love felt by those with whom she lived, Betsy Hemmings’s inscription begins, “Sacred to the Memory of our Mammy, Betsey Hemmings who was Mother, Sister & Friend to all who knew her. The pure in heart shall see God.”
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.”
Lewis Hern, like his father and grandfather before him, did not live with his wife and children. Several generations of Herns had “abroad” marriages, in which husband and wife belonged to different owners, a common feature of slavery in Virginia. Although Lewis Hern and Georgeanna were married by an Episcopal minister in 1853, they had to live apart until freedom came in 1865.
In the post-war years, Lewis Hern progressed from being a farmworker at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson Thomas J. Randolph, to becoming the owner of his own farm. He was a founding deacon of Union Run Baptist Church and, together with George Hughes, purchased a hundred acres of Albemarle County land in 1870. At that time Hern was one of relatively few rural residents in the county to send his children to school. The Hern (now Hearns) family’s stress on education as well as their ties to the land, the Hughes family, and Union Run Church have continued in succeeding generations to the present day.
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.”
Fountain Hughes spent his boyhood in slavery on the Hydraulic Mills property of the Burnley family near Charlottesville. After the Civil War, in which his father was killed while with the Confederate Army, his mother, Mary Hughes, had to hire Fountain out for a dollar a month. In the 1880s he purchased horses and a carriage and worked as a hack driver, but soon sought greater opportunities in Baltimore, MD. There he worked for several decades for the Shirley family as a farmer and gardener.
An interview with Fountain Hughes in 1949 is among the few surviving sound recordings of former slaves. He had vivid memories of slavery in central Virginia and of the harsh conditions for black people during and after the Civil War. His longevity attracted notice and led to numerous articles about him in Baltimore newspapers. Shallie Marshall, his only surviving descendant, remembers outings to the Shirley farm to visit her great-grandfather, “Pap.”
George Hughes was related to two important enslaved families at Monticello, the Hemings family through his father and the Granger family through his mother, Ursula Granger Hughes (1787–after 1847). After Jefferson’s death in 1826, Hughes, his mother, and his siblings remained in slavery at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph; his father was given his freedom unofficially.
After Emancipation in 1865, George Hughes was a farm manager at Edgehill, while his wife, Sarah Jane, was cook at the Edgehill School for Girls. Hughes was a deacon of the Union Run Baptist church pastored by his brother Rev. Robert Hughes. In 1870 George Hughes and his friend Lewis Hern, grandson of Monticello slaves David and Isabel Hern, made a successful bid for one hundred acres of Albemarle County farmland. Hughes and Hern (Hearns) descendants still live on the property today.
