Statement of purpose

Shay Banks Young at Monticello

To help lift the cloud over these dark times, I’m going to tell you a story about my cousin, Shay Banks Young.  I didn’t know she was my cousin until 1998 when my sister Mary and I appeared with Shay and her son Douglas on the Oprah Winfrey show shortly after DNA evidence had proven that the descendants of Sally Hemings were also descendants of Thomas Jefferson because he and Sally had had children together.  Shay was the fifth great granddaughter of Madison Hemings, who was the son of Sally and Thomas Jefferson, born at Monticello in 1805.  My sister Mary and I are sixth great grandchildren of Jefferson and his wife, Martha.

I spent the next five years after meeting Shay taking her and dozens of my other Hemings cousins to the annual family reunion of the Monticello Association, the group of white descendants who own the graveyard at Monticello.  We were trying to convince the Monticello Association to accept our Hemings cousins into the group as descendants of Thomas Jefferson.  We ultimately failed.  The Monticello Association took a vote in 2002 and rejected the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as members.  The vote was 95 to 6, with only one other white Monticello Association member voting along with my brother and three sisters and me to admit the Hemings as members.

The meeting which preceded that vote was contentious.  The Monticello Association members voted to expel our Hemings cousins from the meeting before the vote, something they had not done when the Hemings had been my guests at previous meetings in 1999, 2000, and 2001.  After the meeting, Shay and I were interviewed multiple times by American and international media who were covering the controversy.  Later that night, our Hemings cousins and my family gathered at a Charlottesville restaurant for dinner.  Shay took me aside and told me not to lose heart.  She had been through worse, she said.  Then she told me the story of her first day of school in the seventh grade in Columbus, Ohio in 1957. 

The grade school Shay had attended had been segregated, but she was to attend a junior high school that had just been integrated.  As she walked down the sidewalk into the school that morning, a white girl stepped in front of her and called her the n-word and told her she was not welcome in the school.  Shay ignored her and as she tried to walk around the girl, she pushed Shay to the ground.  Shay stood up, bushed herself off, and hit the girl in the face with her fist, drawing blood.  She walked into the school unmolested further. 

There were complications involving the school principal and her parents and a brief suspension, but Shay graduated from her junior high school and then from Columbus Central High School and went on to become the president of the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers at a nearby Westinghouse plant.  

There are thousands of stories like Shay’s.  The Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Education in 1954 did not result in the desegregation of schools.  The civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did not even accomplish school desegregation in the South.  Passing the Voting Rights Act did not result immediately in the right to vote for Black people in the South.  Blood had to be shed for schools to be desegregated and for Blacks to attain the right to vote.

There are thousands of stories like Shay’s about what women went through before Roe v. Wade.  Now we are reading stories about what women are going through after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.  There are thousands of stories about what gay people endured in their lives before the Stonewall rebellion, about the discrimination and bad discharges gay soldiers suffered before the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  There are thousands of stories of the individual wars women fought in the workplace for equal pay, for the right not to be fired because they got pregnant and had a child.  Unions are still struggling from the aftereffects of Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981.

After the election of Donald Trump on November 5, we know that we will be fighting these same battles for at least another four years while he is in the White House.  With the Supreme Court majority he helped to appoint, we know that these battles will endure past his time in office.  Trump and the Republican House and Senate will attempt to pass laws that will do further damage to the environment, to the climate, to unions, to the rights of minorities and women and LGBTQ people and others who don’t even know their rights and their lives are endangered.  Trump and Republicans will seek to force religion, their fundamentalist Christian religion, into our public schools and government.  They will attempt to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, some with children who are citizens of this country. They will threaten foreign alliances.  They will support foreign autocrats and do damage to foreign democracies.  They will do a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million things that will cost the lives of Americans and innocent people abroad.

I am here to say that we have gone through this before, and we have prevailed.  Shay Banks Young attended integrated schools and so have hundreds of millions of others.  That Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson had children together is accepted by historians and taught as a fact at Jefferson’s Monticello.  So-called conservatives will try to erase history, but history lives among us in the people who have claimed it from the lies and crimes of the past.  Ideas cannot be destroyed, nor can the ideals we have fought to preserve, protect, and extend so that they can outlive us in our children and our children’s children.

This is not optimism.  It is determination.  Our Constitution gives us only one power by which to protect ourselves and our democratic form of government:  the vote.  To quote a tired and overused but true cliché, you win some and you lose some.

It's going to be bad and then it's going to get worse, but I've been around long enough to have seen it really, really bad.  That's why I'm not surprised by either Trump or the people who support him or the things he and they want to do. 

This is my purpose:  I'm not going to take it lying down.  I'm in it for the long haul.  I love this country and our democracy, and I know in my bones we can prevail.   I'll be sitting here at my desk writing columns on the very last day I draw a breath.  When they put me in a box, and bury it in the ground, my soul will be screaming and banging on the sides of my grave for equality and justice and for our democracy.