Word: westerinen
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Despite the chilly reception at the Monticello Association reunions, one person Lanier met there has turned out to be not just a relative but also a good friend. Julia Westerinen, 69, looks white, but she is descended from Sally Hemings' youngest son, Eston. Growing up in Madison, Wis., in the 1930s and '40s, Westerinen was not allowed to play with black children. "My parents told me to stick to my own kind," she says. Even as an adult, she realized that her friendships with blacks had been superficial. "I thought we were friends, but I never had them over...
...When Westerinen met her black cousins at the Hemings reunion in 1999 she was finally able to embrace her biracial heritage. "My life has changed a lot," says Westerinen, an artist, who lives with her husband, son, daughter-in-law and 11-year-old granddaughter in a gray-shingled house with white trim in Staten Island, N.Y. She organized the first Hemings reunion, in July 2003, and has joined up with Shay Banks-Young, who is black and descended from Madison Hemings, to give talks about race relations. "I have a new mission in life, which is to expose...
Truscott told the Washington Post that "white people are scared to find out who their relatives are." That's silly. Hemings' descendants are not only upstanding citizens, a lot of them aren't even "black." For example, there are members of the Westerinen family of Staten Island, N.Y., who trace their lineage to Hemings' youngest son, who moved to Ohio after being freed from slavery and started passing for white. Dorothy Westerinen, who has known all this for only a few months, says, "I'm very proud to share a black lineage." I'm so proud...
...wife, who was also part black, were living in Wisconsin, his name changed to E.H. Jefferson, the marking on the Census now white. The family would become successful members of the white middle class, winding up on social registries. For descendants like Julia Jefferson Westerinen, 64, of New York City, there would be no idea of the family legacy. For her a brush with blackness was befriending the maid or disciplining her daughter Dorothy for using the word nigger...
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