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Article: Who Was Sally Hemings?(slave woman)
- Article from:
- Ebony
- Article date:
- June 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Johnson Publishing Co. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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HER name evokes hundreds of years of mystery, hundreds of years of curiosity, hundreds of years of secrecy surrounding a story--now part of history--that wouldn't die. For nearly two centuries, while historians dissected every piece, every part, every peculiarity of Thomas Jefferson's life, almost no one asked the question that is now on everyone's lips: Who was Sally Hemings?
That the author of the Declaration of Independence had two families--the first by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and the second by Sally Hemings, his beautiful slave and his wife's half-sister--is something generations of Hemings' descendants have been telling the world for nearly two ...