Hemings
Joshua Niles-Dancy
Stephanie Perry
Jacqueline Perry-Haig
George Pettiford
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 Pettiford
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.”
Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Peggy Preacely, a writer, filmmaker, and public health worker, learned her family history from her mother, Ellen Craft Dammond, the “griot of the family,” who recognized that “there were wonderful stories that needed to be kept alive in the family.” Her mother was a niece of William Monroe Trotter as well as a descendant of the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft.
Mother and daughter both participated in the civil rights movement. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi initiative. Peggy Preacely, who sees herself as carrying on a double family line of “freedom fighters,” joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was jailed for sit-ins in the south. As she said, “I had to do something in my lifetime to make a difference because Uncle Monroe did and the Crafts escaped from slavery.”
Diana Redman
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.”
Nancy Lee
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.”