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Cooley Stops the Show: An Overview
It was a moment Sally Hemings might have relished. It was Saturday, October 17, 1992, the fourth day of the mammoth six-day Jeffersonian Legacy conference at the University of Virginia, a conference marking the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, a conference organizer Peter Onuf prophesied would "do a lot to destroy the myths surrounding Jefferson." "By worshipping Jefferson, putting him on a pedestal," Onuf offered, "I don't think we honor his achievements." Little did he know what would happen! Everybody who was anybody in the Jefferson world was there. It was the session on "Jefferson, Race and Slavery" in the Rotunda of the university that Jefferson built. The assembled scholars were discussing whether Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children. When from the audience up rose Virginia attorney Robert H. Cooley III, exclaiming that according to "our [Woodson] family history," "Sally Hemings is the seventh great-grandmother of mine. It's not a story. It's true. There are hundreds of us." "The place went silent," Cooley later recalled, "You could have heard a pin drop on a cotton ball."
What motivated Cooley to profane that sacred precinct, to breast the high priests of Academe? "Illegitimacy haunts the black identity," says Shelby Steele. "Our blackness made our humanity unacknowledgeable. The quest for acknowledgment became built in to us, a part of what it means to be black in America." So, Cooley quested for acknowledgment. He later recalled starting to "tingle" as the scholars talked, and "the more they talked, the more the stinging sensation washed over him in hot waves of resentment and indignation." Cooley's purpose in spontaneously "coming out," as it were, was not to denigrate Jefferson but to celebrate the accomplishments of the Tom Woodson family, Tom being the often disputed first child of Jefferson and Hemings, the one thought to be conceived in Paris. "We [the Woodsons] want to be clear," Cooley explains, that the family focus is on its own accomplishments and its future." Another Woodson descendant puts it this way: "The family's primary interest is not to 'claim' kinship with Thomas Jefferson, but to legitimize the existence of Thomas Woodson."
After Barbara Chase-Riboud's 1979 novel portrays a fictional Sally Hemings who finally has a strong voice, then, in this episode of our miniseries real voices connected to the Jefferson-Hemings relationship begin to echo similarly, applying black family pressure to the official narrative in what we might call, after the books by Brodie and Chase-Riboud, the third turning point. Cooley's stunning Charlottesville show-stopper was not the first occasion in the relatively recent past that pressure was applied by the descendants of Jefferson and Hemings or their agents in order to gain public recognition. Remember that the Ebony article on "Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren" (1954), Pearl Graham's detective work on the descendants of Harriet Hemings (1960), and Brodie's report on responses to her biography (1976) signaled awakening interest in tracking the Jefferson-Hemings family lines. And subsequently Minnie Shumate Woodson (1987) -- married to a descendant of Thomas Woodson -- and Judith P. Justus (1990) published works based on the oral tradition of the Jefferson-Hemings descendants. These authors consider Hemingses that we know less about, as well as the controversial oral tradition of the existence of Thomas Woodson as a child of Jefferson and Hemings. But after Cooley the Hemings children would not only not be invisible but would be a source of constant pressure against the official narrative.
Of course the DNA results (1998), which we will deal with in detail in episode 13, intensified the pressure for acknowledgment by the Jefferson-Hemings family by establishing a link between Eston Hemings and a male Jefferson likely to be Thomas, thus affirming the Hemings family oral tradition, though no genetic link, ironically, was established between Jefferson and Cooley's Woodsons. One might think that the DNA results would have healed the rift that existed between the "Jeffersons" and the "Hemingses"; however, the results seemed to only deepen complications and to remind us more of the perennial feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. There have been, for sure, some highly visible steps toward family unification as a result of the DNA. For instance, in 1999 when members of both the Jefferson family and the Hemings family met for the first time on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Jefferson descendant Lucian Truscott (Truscott, who has been described as a "dissident Jefferson family member" and an "incendiary fellow," is perhaps the most quoted "player" on this aspect of the controversy) issued the Hemingses a public invitation to the upcoming annual Jefferson family reunion at Monticello. And, as another example, in 2001 the combined families enjoyed a public tribute by President Bush at the White House, indicating, said the news story, that White House officials "regarded Hemings' descendants as descendants of the third president." But there has also been a rather severe negative backlash by members of the Jefferson family Monticello Association who do not agree with the DNA results and will not accept the Hemingses. In addition, the provocative PBS Frontline documentary Jefferson's Blood (2000) identified a perplexing, complicated, and even tragic division within the Hemings line itself between those who self-identify as black and those who self-identify as white, regardless of their actual skin color.
The Hemings family struggle with the Monticello Association, which controls the graveyard at Monticello, is a great example of the continuing complications in the post-DNA period. The Hemingses had always seen the ability to be buried at Monticello and to attend the Jefferson family reunions as benchmarks of acceptance of their status as descendants of Jefferson. For a period post-DNA, the Hemingses were invited to the reunion as guests not members of the family, but ultimately the Association voted a definitive "no" to Hemings membership, and now the Hemings line has held its own separate reunions, at the Monticello slave cemetery and elsewhere. Similarly, the Thomas Woodson Family Association organizes reunions for the Woodson family independently, has its own website, and keeps the highly disputed Woodson family oral tradition alive. Shelby Steele's sentiments about family identities being tied to a group's past seem to ring especially true with the Woodsons:
What makes us confront someone over a 200-year-old racial wound, or defend a great-ancestor that even our grandparents didn't know? I think this happens because our racial and family identities tie us to our group's past. They fold this past in to us as individuals, so that we can feel yesterday's wounds almost as powerfully as today's.
Byron Woodson's A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson (2001) shows that the negative DNA results leading to their lack of official recognition did not stop the Woodson vigor to preserve their oral traditions and fight for acknowledgment.
In Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family (2000), Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman (Lanier is a sixth-generation great-grandson of Jefferson and Hemings) interview descendants from both the Jefferson and the Hemings sides of the lineage and not only provide uplifting accounts of family members ready to embrace their newly found family but also interview those who deny the link and do not wish to integrate both sides of the family. Lanier and Feldman's book demonstrates that, even post-DNA, a Jefferson-Hemings relationship is a polarizing, emotional, hot-button issue. Even in the face of these tensions within the families, however, some Jefferson and some Hemings descendants have made a commitment to create unity and peace within the entire family. And in November 2010, the international peace-making organization Search for Common Ground honored three of them for what they have done to heal the rift between family members and work towards peaceful relationships.
Shelby Steele notes thoughtfully in Jefferson's Blood that "If Jefferson's descendants are unconvincing just yet as family, they are nevertheless struggling with their relatedness to each other. But their racial identities attach them to so much history, give them territories to defend, grudges to settle, guilts to redeem. And there is no way to resolve all the history between them. To be a family, Jefferson's descendants will simply have to want family more than race. Out of this wanting they can make new history." Positive attempts are currently being made to create this new history on the black side of Monticello. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has created the Getting Word project that preserves the oral histories of its previously enslaved families. Most importantly and most recently, Annette Gordon-Reed's ongoing history and biography The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) speaks directly to Steele's insights, seeking to heal the racial wound by providing legitimacy for the Hemingses. After the DNA -- what in episode 13 we will term a period in which the controversy went "through the looking glass" -- it's not just about Jefferson any more, and it's not even solely about Sally. It might be said that the Hemings family's emergence from the shadow of Jefferson as a sort of first family of slavery began in earnest with Robert Cooley.
