Hemings-Sally

Ellen Wayles Hemings, the youngest child of Madison and Mary (McCoy) Hemings, married her next-door neighbor Andrew Jackson Roberts in 1878.  In 1887 they left southern Ohio for Los Angeles, a city in the midst of a land boom.  Less than three percent of its population was African American.  A. J. Roberts first engaged in the hauling business and later established the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles.  Both Robertses were active members of the Baptist church.

Ellen and A. J. Roberts’s sons, Frederick Madison Roberts, a member of the California assembly, and William Giles Roberts, joined the family undertaking firm, as did Ivan Saunders, husband of their daughter Myrtle Estelle Roberts.  Her grandchildren revered Ellen Hemings Roberts, who they remember as tall, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed, “very aristocratic” and quiet, but with a sharp wit.  They never heard her talk about her life in Ohio or her connection to Thomas Jefferson.

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.

After being accepted at the University of Virginia, Jacqueline Yurkoski came to Charlottesville with her parents and agreed to answer some questions about how a Sally Hemings descendant of the younger generation feels about her ancestry.  She looks forward to a career in medicine.

Artist, businesswoman, and mother of four, Julia Westerinen did not learn of her connection to Monticello and her African American ancestry until the 1970s. After genetic testing in 1998 established a link between her family line and Jefferson’s, she went on the Oprah Winfrey show and met Shay Banks-Young, a descendant of Madison Hemings, brother of her ancestor Eston Hemings Jefferson.

Since then, they have been speaking to audiences around the country about their family history and issues of race in America.  In her joint interview with Banks-Young, Westerinen notes that since learning of her African American heritage, “I don’t see color anymore like I used to.”

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, 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.