Walter Beverly Pearson - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Walter Pearson was born in Madison, Wisconsin during the American Civil War to Anna Wayles Hemings Jefferson (1836-1866) and her husband Albert T. Pearson (1829-1908) of New York state. Anna was a native of Virginia and the only surviving daughter of Eston Hemings Jefferson and his wife Julia Ann Isaacs. Albert worked as a carpenter in Madison; he served as a captain in the Union Army during the war. Walter had an older brother Fred and an older sister Julia. Their mother died prematurely, at the age of 30, when Walter was just four years old. The three children were educated in public schools.

Pearson's maternal grandfather Eston Hemings Jefferson was born into slavery at Monticello. Seven-eighths European in ancestry, he was legally white under Virginia law and freed in 1826 by the will of his master (and father) Thomas Jefferson. Julia Ann Isaacs, a free woman of color, was of African, European-American and German-Jewish descent. They moved their family from Ohio to Wisconsin in 1852 for added security after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Although all their family was free, slave catchers often kidnapped and enslaved free blacks in those years, as well as capturing fugitive slaves.

In 1852 the Hemings family had changed their surname to Jefferson and entered the white community in Madison, Wisconsin. Anna Jefferson was 16 that year. Both Anna and her brother Beverly Jefferson married white spouses, and all their descendants have identified as white.