Smithsonian Researchers Say DNA Indicates Thomas Jefferson Fathered Children With Sally Hemings

In today’s episode of Things Black People Already Knew, But Now There’s A Book About, the U.S.’ third president, Thomas Jefferson, very likely fathered children with his enslaved victim of mass human trafficking, Sally Hemings, and researchers at the Smithsonian Institution have all but proved it via Jefferson’s DNA, sequenced from samples of his hair.

From the New York Times:

In a new book, Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian scholar who led the effort, describes how a team of researchers used cutting-edge techniques to extract and sequence Jefferson’s DNA. They then compared it with DNA samples obtained from 13 living Hemings and Jefferson family descendants.

It’s a 15-year detective story that involves archaeologists, genealogists, molecular geneticists and historians, stretching across multiple changes in Smithsonian leadership. Kurin, in a video interview this week, called it a “capstone” to decades of previous research, and “extraordinary proof” that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children.

So is it absolutely certain?

“Other people may have other ideas, and I don’t think there’s necessarily an institutional position,” Kurin said. “But I think it’s compelling.” He added: “It’s very clear.”

Kurin’s book, titled History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery, is set to be released Tuesday, and according to TODAY, it “aims to shed light on one of the biggest controversies involving the author of the Declaration of Independence.”

“There was 99.9% chance that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child of Sally Hemings,” Kurin said during a recent interview with TODAY.

Of course, whether or not Jefferson impregnated his enslaved captive has always been a subject of controversy, but only because people who worship a bunch of white guys who have been dead for centuries because they founded this nation refused to believe any of their precious Founding Fathers would do such a thing. Note, they don’t dispute that many of the founders were slave owners; they just dispute that those owners of human beings were raping the human beings they owned and impregnating them — because that would be a hair too far. (See what I did there?)

But Black people, including historians and other academics, have always known the likelihood that Jefferson was one of countless slavers who were having relations with enslaved people who weren’t empowered to deny those slavers their consent. In fact, the history of slavers making babies with their captives is a history we often point to when white people claim they couldn’t be racist because they have a Black spouse, baby-daddy/momma of color, or biracial children.

The controversy is also why the current presidential administration would ban Kurin’s book from any and all federal archives, just as it has tried to force non-whitewashed Black history out of the Smithsonian and national parks across the country via the White House’s white nationalist propaganda and President Donald Trump’s racist executive orders.

Unfortunately for Trump and the rest of white and eternally fragile America, they can’t stop independent researchers from uncovering the truth they’d rather see stay hidden.

Most of the world isn’t as prone to anti-intellectualism as MAGA, and we should all be thankful for that. 

SEE ALSO:

Sally Hemings’ Room To Be Excavated At Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

Smithsonian Explores Thomas Jefferson’s Slave Ownership