AN ARCHIVE OF FREEDOM Three decades of Getting Word By Niya Bates
Before Monticello historian Lucia “Cinder” Stanton and oral historian Dianne Swann-Wright ever conducted their first oral history interview for the Getting Word African American Oral History Project, they embarked upon their research journey with the belief that “understanding Jefferson and his time” would “help us to understand issues of race today.” Their desire to understand the complex entanglements of slavery, race and freedom during the founding era of the United States has guided the Getting Word project over the past three decades and remains an ever-present charge to the project’s leaders and to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. In December 1993, Stanton and Swann-Wright began interviewing descendants of Elizabeth Hemings in Ohio. During the first two years of the project, they recorded 32 interviews with 52 descendants. They located descendants of the enslaved community in Virginia, Ohio, Massachusetts and California — a tremendous feat that would not have been possible without the valuable advice and contributions of Ohio genealogist and historian Beverly Gray. Even then, these three dynamic scholars knew they had only scratched the surface. Getting Word started 30 years ago as a small, grant-funded research project, and its future was not guaranteed. “Its longevity has been surprising,” says Gray. “We expected it to be cut at any moment.” For Gray, the project’s endurance is a testament to the commitment of many people, but especially Monticello’s leaders. Dan Jordan and Leslie Greene Bowman — the past two Foundation presidents — directed funding and support toward the work. Stanton tenaciously pursued truth even when descendants’ oral histories challenged long-held beliefs. Swann-Wright and Susan Stein, who is Monticello’s Richard Gilder Senior Curator of Special Projects, embraced new exhibition content and interpretation models that spotlighted the enslaved community, and dozens of descendants extended their trust and shared their stories with Monticello. This unity of effort allowed the project to grow. By 1997, the Foundation began to host gatherings for descendants. That year, more than 110 descendants of enslaved people, their spouses and their extended families returned to Monticello — many of them meeting each other for the first time. After their families were divided by slave auctions, sales and dowries for Jefferson’s married daughters, descendants of the Hemingses, Fossetts, Hugheses, Grangers, Gillettes, Hubbards and other Monticello families have finally been reunited. The largest of the sales that divided these families took place in 1827 and 1829, which dispersed approximately 130 people far and wide. By reconnecting these families, Getting Word has become a reparative and restorative project. Since the first gathering, there have been several more, each one bigger than the last.
As of the beginning of this year, 225 Getting Word participants have been interviewed through the project and countless more have been identified as relatives, including younger generations. Despite these successes, progress was never easy. Historian and Thomas Jefferson Foundation board member Annette Gordon-Reed believed that existing scholarship on Jefferson in the 1990s “denigrated the humanity of Black people” by relying on “widely held prejudices about the people who were slaves in this country,” thus discrediting any information that could be gleaned from their recollections of Jefferson and slavery at Monticello. In 1998, a DNA study by Eugene Foster confirmed oral histories going back more than a century, which further validated the legitimacy of descendants’ stories and gave added credence to Getting Word . The project has always been bigger than one family or one historical figure. From the beginning, Swann- Wright recalled, the project would not be about only Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, or just about the Hemings family. It would focus on the whole African American community and include stories from the Civil
Dianne Swann-Wright, Beverly Gray and Lucia “Cinder” Stanton laid the foundation for Getting Word in the 1990s.
War, Reconstruction, World War I, New Deal and World War II. Today, one of the most compelling aspects of the project remains its commitment to following Monticello families well into freedom and throughout Monticello’s full history as a plantation, including the time during the Levy family’s ownership of Monticello. The Future of Getting Word Since Stanton’s retirement in 2012, a new generation of scholars has continued to expand upon this archive of
16 SPRING / SUMMER 2023
Powered by FlippingBook