| Episodes |
Lucian K. Truscott, IV: Racial Warrior
Emma Rabinowitz
[1] Descendants of Founding Father and third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson gather annually in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of Jefferson's beloved Monticello estate. A graveyard lies in back of the spatial estate in which Jefferson and his long line of descendants are laid to rest. Members of the Monticello Association, a group of 800 descendants who claim ancestry from Jefferson's two daughters, decide who is allowed into this elite gravesite. One would think that there is more than enough room for burial on the palatial land. However, the Monticello Association has denied burial rights to the descendants of the notorious Sally Hemings, who allegedly had a 38-year relationship with the president.
[2] Most of the association members stand idle and uninvolved to this controversy. They have their promised grave-plot. They don't care about the descendants of a woman who cannot be proven definitively to have had children with Jefferson. However, one man has seen great injustice in this situation. Lucian K. Truscott, IV, believes that "there is plenty of room for the graveyard to grow" and sees prejudicial undertones in barring Hemings descendants from the famed meetings (Truscott, "Barred"). To Truscott this is not just an issue of burial, but, rather, a fight for the Hemings descendants to be accepted as Jefferson kin equal to him and his white family. Truscott is a present-day advocate for squelching racial biases. By fighting for the Hemings to be buried at Monticello, he is in effect shedding light on bigger racial issues still present almost 150 years after the end of slavery.
[3] Hemings descendant Robert Cooley dedicated his entire life to getting the Hemings family recognized as ancestors of Jefferson. Cooley was a fourth-generation great grandson of Thomas Woodson, Sally Hemings' first son. Cooley died in 1998 and his daughter's requests to bury him in Monticello were denied. This denial struck a cord with Truscott, making "me all the more determined to invite the Cooley's, and any other Hemings descendants" to be included in the Monticello Association (Truscott, "Children"). The death and burial denial of Cooley was a catalyst to Truscott's mission. However, his quest was met with strong resistance, highlighting an age-old racial controversy.
[4] There is no official written record of a sexual relationship between the slave and her master. But in 1998 the journal Nature published DNA evidence proving that a "Jefferson male" fathered Sally's youngest son Eston. The lab examined the male Y-chromosome, and although the test itself could not prove definitively that Jefferson fathered Eston, it proved a familial connection. Although this helped prove Truscott's point, ironically, he didn't even feel the need for these findings. He argued that oral tradition passed down through the generations of Hemings descendants was enough evidence of relationship to Jefferson. He as a white descendent of Jefferson didn't have to have a DNA analysis, so why should his black cousins? (Truscott, "Children"). There are no birth records of Sally's children because "slave owners enforced ignorance and illiteracy as power tools" (Truscott, "Gate").
[5] To Truscott DNA should not matter; however, it is a strong argument, and one would think that it might help convince his fellow organization members and board to allow Hemings entry into the Association. But before the findings were even released, there was already contention within the organization. Monticello Association president Robert Gillespie stated during the May 1998 meeting "that if the DNA tests were ‘authoritatively established, the Association will have no option but to allow membership' of the Hemings" (Truscott, "Children"). This might seem like a sign of victory for Truscott and the black Hemings; however, Truscott did not see it this way. He was "shocked by that negative choice of language" that Gillespie used in his speech (Truscott, "Children"). This word choice foreshadows the controversy that emerged after the positive DNA findings.
[6] The DNA analysis prompted Oprah Winfrey to invite members of the black Jefferson family [along with Truscott and his sister Mary] to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Truscott explains that he was overwhelmed by the familial resemblance he saw on the faces of his twenty-five cousins. This prompted him to invite them [right there on national television!] to the next Monticello reunion. This courageous act created a storm bigger than Truscott could have ever imagined.
[7] That May of 1999 the media swarmed the two-family Monticello meeting, possibly the most contentious in the organization's history. The white Jeffersons could not fathom that their beloved Jefferson had an affair with a mere slave woman. This attitude caused them to dismiss the Hemings descendants and go into "executive session" to discuss their membership. Truscott was not alone in his sentiment that the Hemings should stay; others rejected the "executive session" and the group continued the stressed lunch meeting. To Gillespie and other white Jeffersons, the Hemings had essentially "crashed" the annual reunion. In retaliation, they established a membership advisory committee "to consider the criteria for membership and the issue of whether or not descendants of Sally Hemings were also descendants of Thomas Jefferson" (Truscott, "Children"). Truscott found this committee ludicrous. It showed that the Monticello board harbored an elite attitude and rejected clear and concrete evidence of the shared ancestry.
[8] To Truscott, the intense attempts of Gillespie and the board to dismiss the Hemings as Jefferson descendants was "racism -- the bald-faced lie that whites are inherently superior to blacks" (Truscott, "Jefferson's Children"). The board simply dismissed the possibility of a relationship between Hemings and Jefferson, between a superior white male and his juvenile slave. Jefferson's words "All men are created equal," however, ring especially true in this debate. Truscott believed that Jefferson would want the Hemings descendants to be included into the Monticello Association and other family affairs.
[9] Gillespie and the board of the Monticello Association concluded that the Hemings are not allowed in the graveyard, reasoning "they do not produce the same paper trail as we do," even though slaves were illiterate so that producing birth records was essentially impossible (Truscott, "Children"), and adding that "paternity of the Hemings children could lie with Jefferson's brother or nephews" (Truscott, "Jefferson's"). Gillespie rejected the 2000 Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation report written by Dianne Swann-Wright and Cinder Stanton, which stated:
Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings. (Truscott, "Children")
Surprisingly, the majority of the Association seemed to be warming up to the alleged Jefferson-Hemings relationship. After the Foundation report was presented many erupted into a round of applause. This would seem like an important step towards Truscott's goal of familial inclusion.
[10] But Gillespie and his racist goons prevailed in this tragic tale. Hemings descendants were allowed to attend the reunion between the years of 1999-2003 but only as guests not Association members. They recall these years as anything but progressive. The black Jefferson have frequently told Truscott about racial snarls hurled at them by Association members. Many white members even threatened to resign from the organization if the Hemings were allowed membership (Truscott, "Jefferson Table"). This threat was followed by a vote that banned Hemings membership, refusing burial rights in the graveyard, by a strong majority of 75-6. At that meeting Nat Abeles, the new association president, stated that Truscott had abused his privilege of inviting guests when he invited the twenty-five Hemings descendants to the reunion in 2001. Truscott held firm in his values and decided that he would not attend another Monticello Association meeting until the Hemings-Jefferson descendants are allowed membership (Truscott, "Reunion").
[11] Gillespie and members of the Monticello Association insist that their decision is based on lack of evidence of genealogy. Truscott disagrees: "the word ‘genealogy' has become a code word for race," he says (Truscott, "Descendants"). The ancestors of Sally Hemings are not denied because of lack of evidence but because of a strong undercurrent of racism that is still present in a nation in which supposedly "all men are created equal." There was no footnote in the Declaration stating that this only applied to white men. Presently our nation is governed under a black president. Thomas Jefferson would without a doubt be in full support of these great strides towards racial equality.
[12] Although Truscott was not successful in reuniting the two Jefferson families, there is hope for the future. He presently attends the Hemings family reunions. To Truscott a relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings clearly occurred. The extent of their affair will always be a mystery buried deep within our country's tumultuous racial history. The past cannot be altered but that of the future can be. Lucian K. Truscott, IV, stands on his belief that we owe it to our Founding Father to quash the controversy and allow all of Jefferson's descendants to be laid to rest at his dear Monticello estate.
