Searching For the Life of Harriet Hemings

Posted by on November 11, 2013

Senior center holds seminar on Harriet Hemings

Center in the Park will hold a free presentation on Searching For the Life of Harriet Hemings on Wednesday, November 13th at 1pm at 5818 Germantown Avenue in Vernon Park.

Sometime in 1822, Harriet Hemings (the second of Sally Hemings’ children) left Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, boarded a stagecoach to Philadelphia and all but disappeared. Fifty years later, her brother Madison Hemings talked of Harriet passing as white. Her identity as a fugitive slave was never discovered in her lifetime.

This talk follows her childhood, weighs her apparent choices and documents the detective work to locate a woman determined to disappear from the historical record. It uses images to imagine her life at Monticello and later in Philadelphia and Washington. This exploration of Jefferson’s families – both white and black – tells a larger story of gender, race and citizenship.

For more information please contact Brannon at 215-848-7722 ext 225 or by emailing info@centerinthepark.org.