EVERYONE needs a hero. Everyone wants someone to honor. Some members of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association have decided that for them, that person is Sally Hemings, one of Thomas Jefferson's slaves. She has been in the headlines recently because of a study suggesting that she was Jefferson's mistress, and that Jefferson fathered at least one of her children.
The neighborhood association has proposed naming the unnamed road between West Main Street and Cherry Avenue, informally called the 9th-10th Street Connector, after Sally Hemings. The street runs by the Hampton Inn on Main Street - the site where Hemings lived and probably is buried.
Joyce Henderson, president of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association, felt that the street in which Hemings lived and likely is buried should be named after her. "I know there's a lot of opposition from people who do not wish to believe she was his mistress," Henderson told The Daily Progress. The proposal however, "is not to make anybody angry. Our idea is to honor her. It's a fitting way" to commemorate her ("City ponders naming street for former slave," Sept. 9, 1999).
Henderson, who has been a vocal proponent of the street name, insists that Hemings is worthy of such an honor. "Even though we don't really know what all accomplishments there were, I feel that there was something," or Jefferson would not have had a relationship with her. Just as Henderson says, we know very little about Hemings. We don't know what she accomplished, if anything, and we don't even know for sure whether she had a sexual relationship with Jefferson.
Some in the community have questioned why the association is honoring Hemings.
"We don't really know who she was. We don't really know anything about her," Lester Frye, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years, told The Daily Progress. "There are other people in the community who have a lot more accomplishments."
Before the street can be named, it must meet the approval of City Council. Some Council members have supported the proposal, but others are dubious. City Council member David Toscano told The Daily Progress that he was unsure about naming it after Hemings because so little is known about her. Instead, he proposes that the street be named after one of the black artisans who helped build the University and Monticello.
The reason many speak with such certainty of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings is the DNA study titled "Jefferson fathered slave's last child," printed in Nature Nov. 5, 1998. This study, conducted by Eugene Foster, a retired University pathologist, suggested that Jefferson was the father of Hemings' youngest child, Eston. But this was not a conclusive study.
After the article was printed, Foster criticized the headline as "misleading." He went on to write in a letter published in Nature Jan. 7, "We know from the historical and the DNA data that Thomas Jefferson can neither be definitely excluded nor solely implicated in the paternity of illegitimate children with his slave Sally Hemings. When we embarked on this study we knew that the results could not be conclusive."
Not only is there inconclusive scientific evidence, but the weight of the historical evidence points to the conclusion that Jefferson did not father any of Hemings' children. "There were 25 men within 20 miles of Monticello who were all Jeffersons and had the same Y chromosome," Jefferson biographer Willard S. Randall told The Daily Progress. "And 23 of them were younger than Jefferson, who was 65 years old, at that time a very advanced age, when Eston was conceived ... There's too much circumstantial evidence and Jefferson's explicit denial" that he fathered children with Hemings.
There are others to honor with the street name: a black artisan as Toscano suggested, or NFL Hall of Famer and Charlottesville native Roosevelt Brown, as former Charlottesville NAACP president John L. Gaines suggested.
There is little reason to name the road after Hemings. She has been the subject of much conversation in the attempt to debunk Jefferson, but there is no solid evidence of such a relationship. We know little about Hemings, and therefore, there is little reason to honor her. We should find someone worthy of such commemoration, someone we know something about, not someone who happens to be part of what has turned into a popular political debate.
(Peter Brownfeld's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily.)
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