Menu
Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family
Maybe someday
40
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
37/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Rachel Jamison Webster
Publisher:
Henry Holt and Co.
Date:
March 21, 2023
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.
What The Reviewers Say
It’s an awkward situation, to say the least, and to Webster’s credit, she leans into the awkwardness. Her excellent and thought-provoking book is on every level about unknowing rather than knowing.
Sweeping, frequently insightful, often speculative and sometimes extremely moving.
The conversations between Webster and her cousins are among the more compelling parts of the book, providing a platform for the cousins to share the implications of their ancestry as Black people.
A stunning meditation on race, identity, and achievement.
