Webster Rachel Jamison
Webster Rachel Jamison - Benjamin Banneker And Us Eleven Generations Of An American Family - Paperback
Webster Rachel Jamison - Benjamin Banneker And Us Eleven Generations Of An American Family - Paperback
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Description: A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color culture and time putting the past into urgent conversation with the present. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker an African American mathematician a writer of almanacs and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later Rachel Jamison Webster an ostensibly white woman learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DN a cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations among them Banneker's grandparents an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws some of which are still in effect in the present day.
Title: Benjamin Banneker And Us Eleven Generations Of An American Family
Author(s): Webster Rachel Jamison
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
Barcode: 9781250871800
Pages: 384 Pages
Publication Date: 3/19/2024
Category: Black & Asian Studies
Description: A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color culture and time putting the past into urgent conversation with the present. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker an African American mathematician a writer of almanacs and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later Rachel Jamison Webster an ostensibly white woman learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DN a cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations among them Banneker's grandparents an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws some of which are still in effect in the present day.
Title: Benjamin Banneker And Us Eleven Generations Of An American Family
Author(s): Webster Rachel Jamison
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
Barcode: 9781250871800
Pages: 384 Pages
Publication Date: 3/19/2024
Category: Black & Asian Studies
