In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a black man to help him investigate Washington, DC. This man was Benjamin Banneker, an African-American mathematician, author 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 but was a slaveholder. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, a seemingly white woman, learns that this revolutionary black ancestor is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors spanning eleven generations, including Banneker's grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to get married.
Rachel Jamison Webster is a professor of creative writing in the English department at Northwestern University and the author of four books of poetry in addition to “Benjamin Banneker and Us.”
Kendra Field is an associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. She is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War, which traces the migratory lives of her ancestors after the Civil War, and is currently completing The Stories We Tell, a history of African genealogy -American from the Middle Passage to the present.
0:00:00 – Introduction
0:00:51 – Welcome word
0:04:08 – Introducing Rachel Jamison Webster
0:17:13 – Reading 1
0:23:17 – Chat with Kendra Field
0:57:09 – Reading 2
0:59:52 – Closing remarks
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