Hemings-Madison

Frederick Madison Roberts was born in Ohio and grew up in Los Angeles, where his parents moved in 1887.  The first black graduate of the city’s high school and a football star at Colorado College, he was a tax assessor, mortician, and college president.  For many years he published the weekly Los Angeles New Age and, in 1918, he ran for the California legislature.  Elected in a largely white district, he was the first black member of the assembly.  He and his wife, Pearl Hinds Roberts, had two daughters.

Roberts was a vigorous advocate of civil rights in the legislature and in his newspaper, spearheading protests and boycotts as discrimination in Los Angeles grew with the arrival of more and more southerners.  A loyal Republican at a time when blacks were realigning behind Roosevelt’s Democratic party, he lost his seat in 1934 and waged two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress.  In 1952, when slated for an ambassadorship if Eisenhower were elected, his life was cut short by an automobile accident.

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.

Ann Pettiford Medley grew up in Greenfield, Ohio.  She and her husband, Cecil Medley, raised five children and worked in the catering and food services field.  It was her daughter Patti Jo Harding who began to research the family history and enlisted the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant Beverly Gray.  Mother and daughter were present at Getting Word’s first interview in Chillicothe in 1993.  Ann Medley remembers Sunday visits to her grandmother Anna Young Pettiford, some of whose siblings passed into the white world, cutting ties with the family.

George “Jack” Pettiford grew up in a mostly white neighborhood in Greenfield in a still segregated Ohio.  After playing baseball with his white friends, he could not go to a restaurant with them afterward.  When he joined the Navy in World War II, he was pressed to enter a white unit and had to insist that he serve with blacks.  He and his wife, Jacqueline Diggs, raised four children in Columbus.  He attained a supervisory position at the Rockwell Corporation only after many disappointments because of discrimination. He and his wife and his sister Ann Medley participated in the very first interview of the Getting Word project in 1993.  While the women were criticizing the sexual behavior of Jefferson and other slaveholders, Jack raised his voice to say, “But overall he was a great man… And he’s history.  He’s history and he’s great.”

Jacqueline Diggs grew up on a farm in Jackson County, Ohio, member of a family of very light-skinned people who “went as black,” as she says.  Her own appearance made it possible for her to help to break down segregation in the job market in Columbus.  She was married to George “Jack” Pettiford for more than forty years and they raised four children.  When asked when he told her about his ancestry, she laughingly said, “I thought it was a joke.  I thought he was being funny.  But I had hopes — I had hopes that he would turn out like Thomas Jefferson.”

Diana Redman graduated from Ohio State University and works in the Ohio Department of Human Services. After she won a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in high school, her grandmother Ida Mae Young Redman told her of her connection to Thomas Jefferson. She has a love of history, especially about the lives and contributions of “everyday” people, and is proud of her family: “Whatever you want to do, the family is here to support and help you accomplish what you want.”

Andrew J. Roberts was the son of Giles and Nancy Roberts, who moved from Mecklenburg County, VA, to rural Ross County, OH, soon after his birth.  The Robertses were neighbors of Madison Hemings and his family.  A. J. Roberts attended Wilberforce and Oberlin colleges and taught school for fourteen years in Ohio and Tennessee.  In 1878 he married Ellen Hemings.  Nine years later, with two young children (Frederick and Estelle), they left their home and families in Ross County to settle in Los Angeles. 

Working first as a drayman, A. J. Roberts and a friend soon built up what became the Los Angeles Van, Truck and Storage Company.  In the early 1900s Roberts opened the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles, in which his sons Frederick M. Roberts  and William Giles Roberts were also associated.  He was a founder of Tabernacle Baptist Church, was active in the National Urban League, and was described in an obituary as “one of California’s most progressive pioneer citizens.”

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.”

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.”