Early Groundwork: Part Two

This episode contains historically racist language that may be offensive for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Jill continues to dig for evidence of her black relatives and immediately encounters the stumbling block for every researcher of African American families in enslavement: black lives were largely unrecorded and unwritten before the 1870 federal census; the first time people emancipated with the Civil War are listed with full names, ages, and places of birth. There are problems associated with the fallibility of human memory: names passed down through oral traditions by Jill’s grandmother Ellen, for Anita’s mother and grandmother, do not line up with the paper trail. Jill decides to try and answer the larger question: why did the Hemmings family chose Boston over other American cities with larger African American populations? Jill’s explorations of the family’s neighborhood in Boston’s Beacon Hill reveal a long and rich history of the presence of free African Americans; a unique community of people associated with the long struggle for freedom and equality.