Hemings
Lena Willand
Susan Smart
Gloria Mitchell Thornburgh
James Monroe Trotter
Born in slavery in Mississippi, James Monroe Trotter was educated in Ohio and became a schoolteacher. In June 1863 he and his friend William H. Dupree traveled to Boston to enlist in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Both were commissioned second lieutenants in 1864 but had to wait a year for official recognition. Trotter was one of most prominent spokesmen in the dispute over equal pay for African American soldiers.
After the war, Trotter and Dupree returned to Ohio, married sisters Virginia and Maria Elizabeth Isaacs, and moved to Boston where they obtained good positions in the U.S. Postal Service. In 1878 Trotter published a groundbreaking survey of African American music. His distinguished war record and support of the Democratic Party led to appointment as District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds in 1887, the highest government office open to blacks. Trotter’s passionate commitment to equality inspired his famous son, William Monroe Trotter.
Virginia Isaacs Trotter
Virginia Isaacs, daughter of Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs, was raised on a farm in Ross County, Ohio. After the Civil War she and her sister Maria Elizabeth Isaacs married two veterans of the Civil War, Lts. James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree. Both couples settled in Boston, where Trotter and Dupree were well-known figures after distinguished service as officers in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiment. Virginia Trotter and her sister were described by a contemporary as women of “charming sociability and cultured manners.”
The Trotters lived in Hyde Park, a largely white suburb of Boston, and accumulated property, particularly after James Monroe Trotter’s appointment to the lucrative position of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. They had three children, William Monroe, Maude, and Bessie. After her husband’s early death, Virginia Trotter managed the family investments and supported her son Monroe, allowing him to establish the Boston Guardian, and become a leading voice in the early civil rights movement.
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter, the most famous of known descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families, was the son of Virginia Isaacs and James Monroe Trotter. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, which he viewed as the exemplar of “real democracy.” But his world began to contract, as the Jim Crow line moved inexorably up from the south. He gave up a lucrative real estate business to start a newspaper, the Boston Guardian, and raised his voice against the accommodationist principles of Booker T. Washington. In 1905 he and W. E. B. Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAACP.
In his long, militant and uncompromising fight for “full equality in all things governmental, political, civil and judicial,” Trotter presented petitions, led picketing and demonstrations, and confronted presidents in the White House. His last national effort was described at the time as a movement for “the fulfillment of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.”
Arthur Westerinen
Emil Westerinen
Julia Jefferson Westerinen
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.”
Jesse Scott
Jesse Scott, son of a Pamunkey Indian, was a violinist and dance band leader well known throughout Virginia. One contemporary recalled a dance at which Scott and his sons Robert and James formed the band: “Such music they made as the gods of Terpsichore will never hear again in this generation.” At the 1827 Monticello dispersal sale, Jesse Scott represented his wife’s family. He purchased his sister-in-law Edith Fossett and two of her children, so they would not be separated from their husband and father, Joseph Fossett.
Nancy Colbert Scott
Nancy Scott was most likely the daughter of Monticello’s butler Burwell Colbert and his wife, Critta Hemings. In the late 1820s, Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph sold her to Albemarle County clerk Alexander Garrett, who in 1842 sold her to her husband, Robert Scott. The Scotts had at least nine children and lived on Charlottesville’s main street.
Nancy Scott’s oldest child, Elizabeth, was the subject of a remarkable story preserved orally by her descendants and validated by historical records. It states that Elizabeth, who took the surname of her stepfather, Robert Scott, was Thomas J. Randolph’s daughter and was sold to the Garrett family. She was recaptured, after trying to run away, and put on the auction block and sold to a Dr. Cox, who made her his mistress. They had five children, one of them Nannie Cox Jackson, a noted Charlottesville educator and community leader. When Emancipation came, in 1865, Elizabeth Scott determined to live independently and supported her family by working as a dressmaker.