Race in America, made personal
Issues of history and race played an important part in Annette Gordon-Reed’s young life. In the early 1960s at age 6, she enrolled in an all-white elementary school as the only black student in her first-grade class. Later, after reading biographies of Thomas Jefferson, she found herself drawn to the nation’s third president, in part because of his fascination with books, much like her own, his insatiable curiosity, and his claim to support equality even though he owned slaves. Those early experiences may have helped to inspire Gordon-Reed, now a Harvard Law School professor, to write two seminal books that have been credited with redefining the nature of scholarship on Jefferson. In 1997’s “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” she explored the relationship between the Revolutionary leader and his slave, the half sister of his wife, presenting a convincing case that Jefferson fathered several children with Hemings after his wife’s death....