Hemings

Frederick Madison Roberts

Posted on May 28, 2025 by Auriana Woods -

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.

Peter Fossett

Posted on May 28, 2025 by refresh -

Peter Farley Fossett (1815-1901), the son of Joseph Fossett and Edith Hern Fossett was sold, along with his mother and siblings, at the 1827 dispersal sale following Jefferson’s death. When his father, who had been freed in Jefferson’s will, earned enough money to purchase him, Peter’s new owner refused to sell him. Peter Fossett twice tried to run away, without success. Finally, in 1850, he was purchased out of slavery through the efforts of his free family members.

He joined his parents and siblings in Cincinnati, where he became one of the city’s most prominent caterers, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and a renowned Baptist minister. In his 1898 published recollections, he spoke of his struggles to learn to read and write by stealth and how writing skills allowed him to forge free papers to help fellow slaves to escape. He and his wife, Sarah Mayrant Fossett, were active in a number of civic organizations as well as in the church they founded.

Robert Hughes

Posted on October 8, 2024 by Auriana Woods -

Robert 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–post 1847). After Jefferson’s death in 1826, Robert 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.

Robert Hughes was the Edgehill blacksmith and a Baptist preacher. He and his wife, Sidney Evans, a household servant, and their children became free at the end of the Civil War. Hughes began acquiring land, owning 130 acres at his death. He was the founding minister of the still-flourishing Union Run Baptist Church adjacent to Edgehill. In 1997 Getting Word participants, including Rev. Robert Hughes’s descendant Timothy Hughes witnessed the rediscovery of the founding minister’s grave marker. The marker had been previously located ten years prior by J. Calvin Jefferson, another Hughes descendant. The first word revealed on the stone was “Memory.”

Joyce Dorsey Harrod

Posted on December 15, 2022 by refresh -

Joyce Harrod grew up in the Washington, DC area, where she still lives. Ms. Harrod is an artist and teaches art to middle school students. Her father, George Harrod, was the first African American to hold various positions in the federal government. In her interview, she expressed herself as very proud of her father and said her grandmother had led “a model life” as a person of strong faith and “an independent woman”: “She continues to be an inspiration to me.”