The participants in the Getting Word project tell stories that show the skills, values, and powerful bonds of family that have been passed down over more than seven generations.
Robert Hemmings’s Signature
Listen as Andrew Davenport, Auriana Woods, and Bernetiae Reed share the recent rediscovery of Robert Hemmings’s signature, a revelation confirming the literacy and the agency of the man that Thomas Jefferson enslaved as his valet. As a teenage boy, Hemmings was at Jefferson’s side in Philadelphia when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and later gained his own freedom, becoming the first of very few to be freed by Jefferson.