White House Entitlement

The descendants of Paul Jennings, who was a slave in James Madison’s White House, are being invited back to the White House for a reunion next week. Their treatment is far better than the Blacks who claimed to be descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

Ten years ago, when DNA findings about Jefferson’s descendants were published, several members of the Jefferson/Hemings family had their first meeting on The Oprah Winfrey Show. One of Jefferson’s white descendants, Lucian Truscott IV, invited his Hemings cousins to the next annual Jefferson family reunion at Monticello in May 1999. Michele Cooley Quille attended that Monticello meeting to present the dying wish of her father, Robert H. Cooley III, to be buried at Monticello. Cooley, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, had died suddenly on July 20, 1998. The Monticello Association, consisting of lineal descendants of Jefferson, denied her request because the DNA evidence wasn’t yet published.

The Cooley family represents a part of Black America that wants recognition for having “a President in the family.” In February 2001, the Cooley family went to Virginia’s General Assembly to witness the passing of a resolution that publicly acknowledges the growing body of evidence that Jefferson and Hemings had children together. Two months later, President George W. Bush invited the Jefferson and Hemings families to the White House for a celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s 258th birthday.

The Jefferson/Hemings relationship has since been acknowledged by the William and Mary Quarterly, the National Genealogical Society, and, in January 2000, the Thomas Jefferson (Memorial) Foundation, which owns Monticello. Nevertheless, in May 2002 the Monticello Association voted against admitting descendants of Sally Hemings into their organization, concluding that there was not sufficient evidence to prove Jefferson fathered Hemings's children.

Then on February 24, 2003, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation revised its statement regarding the children of Sally Hemings: “Although the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings has been for many years … a subject of intense interest to historians and the public, the evidence is not definitive, and the complete story may never be known. The Foundation encourages our visitors and patrons, based on what evidence does exist, to make up their own minds as to the true nature of the relationship.” Thus, even strong scientific evidence butts up against white racial resistance to a broadened understanding of American nationhood that includes Black Americans as members of a founding family.

Mr. Jennings’s story feels “cleaner,” he doesn’t claim to be related to Madison, he bought his freedom, worked in the government’s pension office, bought property and even helped support the former first lady Dolley Madison with “small sums from my own pocket” when she fell on hard times. This is a story that even whites can be proud of. Jefferson’s descendants don’t have it so easy. I’d rather be invited to the White House, than fight to be buried at Monticello. Fortunately, Sasha and Malai’s kids won’t have to prove there was a President in their family.

They’ll probably call him Grandpa.

The Original Black First Lady: Sally Hemings

I recently did a radio interview with BJ Janice Peak-Graham about my book, Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton. She said that as she was reading the book, she was struck with the realization that I was, in fact, writing about her life. She had been a Clinton appointee, and it had never occurred to her that her experience was part of the political history of that time period.

Watching the coverage of the Obama family in the White House, one can’t help but feel a certain media giddiness to be able to report on all these new “firsts.” But to say that this family is the first Black family of an American president is simply wrong.

Before Michelle Obama there was Sally Hemings, who bore the sons and daughters of Thomas Jefferson. I’d like to share an excerpt from my second book edited with Bruce D Baum, Racially Writing the Republic.

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One of Thomas Jefferson’s more convoluted legacies is the material and cultural capital – including access to racial whiteness – he passed on to Sally Hemings’s children. He freed all of Hemings’s children. Following his promise to Sally that her children would be freed at the age of twenty-one, her oldest children, Beverley (a son) and his sister Harriet, were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822, the year that Harriet turned twenty-one. (Beverley had turned twenty-one two years earlier.) By the terms of Jefferson’s will (he died on July 4, 1826), Madison and Eston Hemings were freed, after ostensibly serving as apprentices until they attained their majority to their uncle, the carpenter Johnny Hemings.

At Jefferson’s extraordinary request, the brothers were given permission by the Virginia legislature in 1826 to remain in the state after winning freedom. (An 1806 law had decreed that emancipated slaves otherwise had to leave Virginia within a year.) That the Hemings children’s freedom was tied to their coming of age suggests that Jefferson thought of Sally Hemings as his “substitute wife.” Jefferson freed no other slave in this fashion. Furthermore, Harriet Hemings was the only female slave Jefferson ever freed.

Madison Hemings referred to his parents’ relationship as the “treaty” of Paris – a treaty of sexual commerce – with Jefferson promising lenient, indulging treatment in return for sexual favors. The Hemings children and their descendents gained tangible benefits from this sexual commerce, although until recently this did not include recognition as Jeffersons. As Lucia Stanton explains, “Jefferson gave Madison Hemings what few sons of slave women received – a skilled trade, if not an education, and the freedom to pursue it for his own benefit.”

At the same time, Madison’s children and grandchildren remained in Ohio, where he had moved, and “were bound by the restricted opportunities for blacks at the time.” Meanwhile, Harriet, Beverley, and Eston Hemings passed into the white world. They traded the burdens of hiding the Black side of their family tree for the benefits of racial whiteness. For instance, Eston and his wife Julia moved to Ohio in 1852, passed into whiteness, and changed their family name to Jefferson. Their daughter Anna married and lived as a white woman; their sons Beverly F. Jefferson and John Wayles Jefferson became successful businessmen, and their “grandsons even exceeded the success of [their] sons.”

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If you want to read more, you need to buy the book, but here’s the question of the week, “Have you ever “passed” for anything? (Straight, wealthy, or even another religion, or race?)

Sister Regina Benjamin and Sister Joycelyn Elders

So on Tuesday night Jon called me from his business trip. He was meeting with the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), a national non-profit organization representing the 70 medical boards of the United States and its territories.

I was meeting with three children who didn't want to go to bed.

Jon: Duch, when you come out on Thursday bring a copy of your book, Regina wants one.

Duchess: (children in the background fighting over Wii)
Regina who? Haven’t I told you that we’re not giving these away, they’re for sale.

Jon: Regina Benjamin!

Duch: Regina Benjamin? What’s she doing out there? She’s no longer the chair.

Jon: The immediate past chair serves for a year.

Duch: Why on earth does she want to read my book?

Jon: I told her about the Joycelyn Elders part. Don’t tell me you don’t want to give the future Surgeon General a copy.

(pause)

Duch: One free book going in my suitcase.

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Joycelyn Elders’ story resonated with me deeply in 1994 when she was labeled a “Condom Queen” and forced to resign as Surgeon General. The welfare queen is the defining social stereotype of the Black woman: a lazy, promiscuous, single Black mother living off the dole of society. She poses a threat to the Protestant work ethic that drives America and the American Dream of social advancement and acceptability. The welfare queen trope is a complicated social narrative in which race, gender, and class are interlocked. The welfare queen metaphor does not simply embody images of Black women; its broad-ranging scope is deeply embedded in almost every facet of our social and political discourse.



The episodes recounted in my book of Vanessa Williams, Anita Hill, Carol Moseley Braun, Lani Guinier, and Joycelyn Elders were all heavily influenced by the welfare queen narrative. Noted legal scholar Lani Guinier was branded a “Quota Queen” by conservative political groups in their effort to block her nomination to a top position in the Justice Department. As Patricia Williams observed, “‘Quota Queen’ evoked images of welfare queens and other moochers who rise to undeserved heights, complaining unwarrantedly all the way. Lani Guinier, the complex human with a distinguished history, was reduced to a far-left ‘element’....”

As Patricia Williams so aptly concluded: “The use of the term ‘queen’ to describe Dr. Elders, another Black woman ultimately driven from her post in a doggedly-waged smear campaign, highlights the extent to which the connotations of the term demand some explicit consideration.” The Clinton Administration did not establish a stellar record of interactions with outspoken Black women. Additionally, it was also particularly ironic and paradoxical that this convergence of the passage of welfare reform and continued manipulation of racist caricatures (especially about Black women) occurred within a “Democratic” administration.

Please get a copy of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton so you can understand that this was a critical moment in American politics and culture, a point where rational ideas about contraception fell to the hysteria of religious moral dogma and familiar racist constructs.

I am more hopeful about the Obama administration, and I wish Dr. Benjamin the best.