Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Pearl Hinds Roberts was the daughter of Lucy McKinney and Wiley Hinds, a former slave who left Arkansas in 1858 for the Central Valley of California. The Hinds family divided its time between Oakland and their large cattle ranch in Tulare County. Pearl Hinds studied music at the Boston Conservatory and Oberlin College, as well as with Fossett descendant Pauline Powell Burns in Oakland. For a time she headed the music department at what is now South Carolina State University.
In 1921 she married Frederick Madison Roberts, then a member of the California legislature. They lived in Los Angeles, where continued her musical career as organist and choir director in various churches. From 1942, she worked in retail—the first black salesperson in a downtown department store. Her watchword was, “If you have ideals, hang on to them despite disappointments.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Virginia Rose was the daughter of Elizabeth Letitia (Bessie) Trotter and Henry Kempton Craft, a Harvard graduate, electrical engineer, teacher, and YMCA executive. He was the grandson of William and Ellen Craft, famous for their daring escape from slavery in 1848. Bessie Trotter, who attended the New England Conservatory of Music, was the sister of the prominent civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter.
Virginia Rose attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduated from Barnard College, and did graduate work at Western Reserve University. She married Joshua Rose in 1934 and they moved to California, where he headed the Oakland branch of the YMCA. She passed her pride in her Trotter and Craft heritage along to their three children, who shared memories of cross-country car trips to keep up with their East Coast roots. Only late in life did Mrs. Rose begin to “ponder” her connection to the Fossetts of Monticello. As she said in 2006, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from.”
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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.
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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.
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Robert Scott was born free, the son of Sarah Bell and Jesse Scott, a free man of color whose mother was a Pamunkey Indian. The Scott trio (Robert, his brother James, and his father) were well known musicians who traveled all over Virginia playing at dances at private homes, mountain resorts, and the University of Virginia
Scott married Nancy Colbert, probably the daughter of Burwell and Critta Colbert of Monticello. He was able to purchase her and some of their nine children out of slavery. In 1857 Robert Scott, who had more than three-quarters white ancestry, successfully petitioned the court to be declared “not negro”–an intermediate status between white and black or “mulatto.”
Robert Scott lived in the Bell-Scott house on Charlottesville’s main street for almost ninety years. He was a rich source of recollections about Jefferson and, at his death, was described as “a man who in the course of a long life never failed to command the respect of his fellow citizens.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Sarah Jefferson Bell, the daughter of Mary Hemings and white merchant Thomas Bell, lived in freedom on Charlottesville’s main street. Her husband, Jesse Scott, with their sons James and Robert Scott, led a dance band well known throughout Virginia.
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John Freeman Shorter was raised in freedom in Washington, D.C. In 1863 he left Delaware County, Ohio, for Boston, in order to enlist in one of the first black regiments to be organized, the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He became one of only three fully-commissioned black officers in the regiment; the other two lieutenants, James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree, were also connected to Monticello.
Despite promises of equal treatment, the pay of the men of the Massachusetts regiments was half that of white soldiers and Shorter, like Trotter, became a leader in the fight for equal pay. He was wounded at the Battle of Honey Hill near Charleston, South Carolina, in November 1864. After being honorably discharged in 1865, he returned to Ohio to marry his fiancé, but died within weeks of reaching home. Shorter’s brother Charles Henry Shorter served in the 22nd U. S. Colored Infantry and survived the war to be an officer in a Washington post of the Grand Army of the Republic.
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