Family
Though free, Mary Hemings remained in close communication with her enslaved family at Monticello and was remembered by them many years after her death. As an elderly man, her grandson Peter Fossett recalled how when he was a child, his free grandmother Mary gave him a suit of blue nankeen cloth and a red leather hat and shoes, grand compared to the attire of children of field slaves.
One of Mary's most notable descendants was William Monroe Trotter, who became a prominent Boston newspaper publisher, human rights activist, and a founder of the Niagara Movement, precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Trotter graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1895; in his junior year he became the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Trotter was a contemporary of fellow Harvard alumnus W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1896, Trotter earned a master's degree from Harvard, planning a career in international banking. But despite his outstanding credentials, racism thwarted his efforts to find work in that field.
Read more about this topic: Mary Hemings
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfilment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)
“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media—movies, Telstar, flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)