Description
"Getting Word" reflects over eight years of research as part of the Getting Word project, which was initially funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. Since its inception in 1993, the project has involved travel beyond Virginia to Alabama, California, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington, and the District of Columbia to interview descendants of Monticello's enslaved families and to conduct research in libraries and public records repositories. Over 80 interviews were conducted with almost 140 individuals, descendants of several different Monticello families as well as others with knowledge of descendants. These descendants have been from four to eight generations removed from their ancestors who lived in slavery at Monticello. These multiple generations reveal much about two centuries of the African-American experience in the United States. "Getting Word" follows a chronological structure, including twenty to thirty edited interviews chosen and arranged to highlight the history of each decade from the time of Thomas Jefferson's death in 1826, when the Monticello African-American community was dispersed, to the 1970s. "Getting Word: The Monticello African-American Oral History Project" was published in 2002 by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., and is available at the Monticello website (https://www.monticello.org/getting-word). Academic Year 2002-2003, Summer 2003
