Hemings
Noel Day, Jr.
Stephen De Windt
Stephen De Windt moved with his family from the San Francisco Bay area to Pasadena when he was twelve. He attended Pasadena City College and Arizona State University. After a career in the airline industry, he became an actor—a “background artist”—in Hollywood.
De Windt heard a great deal about his talented great-great-aunt Pauline Powell Burns from the women in his family. Fascinated by his family history, he made a number of donations to the collections of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland. He was not fully aware of his connection to the Fossetts of Monticello until 2006. When he heard their story, his response was, “They stepped up to the plate.”
Doris Diggs
Eliga Diggs
Through his mother, Minnie Lee Young Diggs, Eliga Diggs is descended from Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant, brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846. From the age of eight Diggs had to work hard on the family tenant farm, on land rented from Bankhead’s descendants, the Hotchkiss family. He served two years in the U. S. Army, had various construction jobs, and was a control room operator at a paper mill when he retired. He has been active in local civic organizations and once ran for mayor of North Courtland.
Eliga and Doris Owens Diggs have four children, one of whom married professional baseball player Gary Redus. While he didn’t hear stories of the Scotts, he remembers hearing about his great-grandmother Mildred Scott Young, who loved roses: “The roses are still at the old home site there.”
Lester B. Diggs
Lester B. Diggs, who has lived in Courtland his whole life, attended Alabama State University and worked for Reynolds Metals Company. Through his mother, Minnie Lee Young Diggs, he is descended from Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant, brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846.
Diggs grew up on a farm owned by the Hotchkiss family, who are Bankhead descendants, and he describes cotton cultivation in his interview. He also recalls meeting Martin Luther King in 1956 in Montgomery, shortly after King’s house was fire-bombed.
Mary Ellen Rose Butler
Marion Elizabeth Carter
Lessie Young Clay
Lessie Young was the great-granddaughter of Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846. She, like her ancestors, worked for Jefferson’s descendants and, for many years, was cook for Bankhead’s granddaughter Miss Cary Hotchkiss. Her husband, Elbert Clay, was farm foreman. Bankhead descendants preserved Lessie Clay’s recipes, heard her talk of her ancestors at Monticello, and recorded her memories in a joint interview with Miss Cary in 1971.
Brown Colbert
Brown Colbert lived his first twenty years at Monticello, where he worked as an enslaved domestic servant and a nailmaker. In 1805, he asked to be sold to a free workman leaving Monticello, so that he and his wife would not be separated. Jefferson reluctantly agreed and the Colberts lived in slavery in Lexington, Virginia, until 1833, when they took a momentous step.
In exchange for freedom, they agreed to leave Virginia for a new colony in Africa. Colbert, his wife, Mary, and their two youngest sons boarded a ship for Liberia, leaving behind three grown children who could not be freed. Tragically, only one of the family, eight-year-old Burwell, survived the first weeks in the new land of freedom. He may have lived to see Liberia become Africa’s first independent republic in 1847.
Descendants of Colbert left behind in Virginia include a Union Army soldier, teachers and university professors, and a well-known lecturer and suffragist. The story of their ancestors’ courageous gamble for freedom was evidently not passed down orally but it survived in a family Bible.