Benjamin Banneker and UsRachel Jamison WebsterLabel: Henry Holt & Company IncDescription: In 1791 Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker an African American mathematician a writer 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 yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later Rachel Jamison Webster an ostensibly white woman learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather 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 across eleven generations among them Banneker’s grandparents an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws some of which are still in effect in the present day.
