This is a painful and complicated American story. Thomas Jefferson was one of our most important founding fathers, and also a lifelong slave owner who held Sally Hemings and their children in bondage. Sally Hemings should be known today, not just as Jefferson’s concubine, but as an enslaved woman who – at the age of 16 – negotiated with one of the most powerful men in the nation to improve her own condition and achieve freedom for her children.

Sally Hemings (1773-1835) is one of the most famous—and least known—African American women in U.S. history. For more than 200 years, her name has been linked to Thomas Jefferson as his “concubine,” obscuring the facts of her life and her identity. Tradition holds that she is the child of Martha Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, and Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved woman, making Martha and her half-sisters. When Sally Hemings was 14, she was chosen by Jefferson’s sister-in-law to accompany his daughter Maria to Paris, France, as a domestic servant and maid in Jefferson’s household.

In Paris, Hemings was reunited with her older brother James, whom Jefferson had brought with him two years earlier to study French cooking. They lived at Jefferson's residence, the Hôtel de Langeac. Maria (Polly) and Martha (Patsy), Jefferson’s older daughter who was already in Paris, lived primarily at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, where they were boarding students. Shortly after her arrival, Jefferson’s records indicate that Hemings was inoculated against smallpox, a common and deadly disease during that time. She undoubtedly received training—especially in needlework and the care of clothing—to suit her for her position as lady's maid to Jefferson's daughters and was occasionally paid a monthly wage of twelve livres (the equivalent of two dollars). She learned French (historians do not know if she was literate in either language she spoke) and sometimes accompanied Jefferson’s daughters on social outings.

Madison Hemings recounted that his mother “became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine” in France. When Jefferson prepared to return to America, Hemings said his mother refused to come back, and only did so upon negotiating “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her future children. He also noted that she was pregnant when she arrived in Virginia, and that the child “lived but a short time.” No other record of that child has been found.

Sally Hemings had at least six children fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Four survived to adulthood. Decades after their negotiation, Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings’s children – Beverly and Harriet left Monticello in the early 1820s; Madison and Eston were freed in his will and left Monticello in 1826. Jefferson did not grant freedom to any other enslaved family unit.

Beverly and Harriet Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without being legally freed. Madison Hemings later reported that both passed into white society and that neither their connection to Monticello nor their “African blood” was ever discovered.

Sally Hemings’s descendants and historians have a range of opinions about the dynamic between Jefferson and Hemings, given the implications of ownership, age, consent, and dramatically unequal power between masters and enslaved women. Enslaved women had no legal right to consent. Their masters owned their labor, their bodies, and their children.

The nature of Sally Hemings’s sexual encounters with Thomas Jefferson will never be known.

The historical evidence points to the truth of Madison Hemings’s words about “my father, Thomas Jefferson.” Although the dominant narrative long denied his paternity, since 1802, oral histories, published recollections, statistical data, and documents have identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. In 1998, a DNA study genetically linked one of Hemings’s male descendants with the male line of the Jefferson family, adding to the wealth of evidence.
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Jefferson never responded to the accusation. His recognized family denied his paternity of Hemings’s children, while his unrecognized family considered their connection to Jefferson an important family truth.

A Philosophic Cock, engraved by James Akin, 1804. This political cartoon mocked President Jefferson, the strutting rooster, with his concubine Sally Hemings (pictured as a hen)–at the same time denying her humanity and privacy.


Information in this post is taken from https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/
Follow the link for more details about the life of Sally Hemings. 

With Valentine's Day around the corner, thoughts of romance are in the air. My contribution to this February trend is a review on the 1967 movie, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

As mentioned in a previous post about Richard and Mildred Loving, on June 12, 1967, in a unanimous decision, the justices of the Supreme Court found that Virginia’s interracial marriage law violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Not only did this ruling overturn the criminal conviction of the Lovings in 1958, it overrode the anti-miscegenation laws of sixteen states, including Virginia and Maryland.“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.

This movie followed, bringing public attention to the ruling. 

In the movie, one of the voices encouraging John and Joanna’s marriage was an Irish Catholic Priest and a friend of the family. Monsignor Ryan told Joanna’s father, “I've known a good many cases of marriages between races in my time. Strangely enough, they usually work out quite well. I don’t know why. Maybe because it requires some special quality of effort, more consideration and compassion, than most marriages seem to generate these days.”


The couple had met while in Hawaii, fallen madly in love and embarked on a whirlwind romance which culminated in a decision to be married within a matter of weeks. John Prentice is a doctor who had earned a great reputation for himself and was flying to Geneva the following morning. Joanna Drayton was determined to follow him in a week and to marry him there. But first, John needed to get permission from Joanna’s father.
Joanna is certain that her parents wouldn’t be the slightest put out by the fact that John is negro. After all, her father is known for his liberal opinions, which he printed regularly in black and white in his California newspaper. Her mother is an open-minded artist, and Joanna is very close to both her parents. She believes they will be happy for her and gladly give their blessing.
John isn’t quite as confident as Joanna, and it turns out his instincts are right. Despite all their talk about equality, her parents never considered the fact that their principles might be put to the test in such a real and personal way. It had all been very theoretical. Now they only have one evening to decide how they feel about having a black man for a son-in-law.
When John phones his parents to explain that he’s not coming to visit them before he boards another plane because he’s met a girl, he fails to mention that the girl is white. Joanna takes the phone from him and invites his parents to dinner, and when they meet her, they are as shocked as her parents had been meeting John.
Both their fathers analyze the relationship from a practical mindset and lay out all the potential consequences, while the mothers shake their heads and wonder why old men forget how it feels to be young and in love. Spoiler alert: in the end, Joanna's father gives his blessing. 

“But you do know—I'm sure you know—what you're up against. There'll be a hundred million people right here in this country who'll be shocked and offended and appalled at the two of you. And the two of you will just have to ride that out. Maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You can try to ignore those people, or you can feel sorry for them and for their prejudices, and their bigotry and their blind hatreds and stupid fears. But where necessary, you'll just have to cling tight to each other and say screw all those people! Anybody could make a hell of a good case against your getting married. The arguments are so obvious that nobody has to make them. But you're two wonderful people who happened to fall in love… and happen to have a pigmentation problem.”

Due to the era in which the movie was made, the acting feels stiff and it's full of stereotypes that some might find offensive. But all in all, I think it's a sweet film that demonstrates how each and every one of us can be hypocritical and narrow-minded without even realizing it, and sometimes we just need someone to challenge us to think through the issue with fresh eyes. 

Although I thought Joanna seemed a little too naïve and impulsive, I admired her whole-hearted dedication to John despite the adversities she knew would come as a result. She was impressed with his intelligence, kindness, and character, and they had plenty of chemistry between them. From her rather innocent perspective, what was there to reconsider? 

From John's point of view, he had been single for years since the death of his wife. One day he met a woman with whom he felt a connection, the type of connection that's worth turning your life upside and risking everything for. You can't force that kind of thing, and you can't control with whom it happens either. He knew what love felt like, and he knew what being content alone felt like. When he met Joanna, he knew that what they shared was special.

​If you haven't seen it before, I recommend giving it a chance. I'd be shocked if it didn't make you smile.

Another movie along the same lines, which I love for a variety of reasons, is "Corrina, Corrina," starring Whoopi Goldberg and Ray Liotta, made in 1994. So now you have two more titles to add to your list of romance movies to watch in celebration of Valentine's Day. And a word to the wise, don't eat those candy hearts. They taste like chalk.