Gayle Jessup White

Critically acclaimed author Gayle Jessup White’s electrifying account of how she unearthed her family’s ties to one of the most enduring mysteries in American history —which Henry Louis Gates Jr called “a real life version of Roots” — will keep your audience on the edge of their seats.

As told in her book Reclamation— hailed by television personality Bakari Sellers as “a quintessential American story that should be required reading”—her quest began when she was the inquisitive youngest member of a black middle class family in Washington, D.C. listening to vague stories handed down from an elderly aunt: that her family was descended from Thomas Jefferson, the legendary author of the Declaration of Independence who declared that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness while enslaving hundreds of people.

A history buff even as a child, Gayle set out to learn the truth about those tantalizing pieces of oral history. It took four decades —a journey that eventually led her to Monticello, Jefferson’s legendary mountaintop plantation in Virginia, where she joined the staff and, with the help of historians, genealogists and long lost family members, proved that the legend was true. She was able to establish not only a previously unknown line of descent from Jefferson himself, but also to many of the families who were enslaved at Monticello—the Hemings, and who else.

Part deep dive into history, part suspenseful detective story, part inspiring memoir, delivered with the brio of a former actress and tv news anchor, Gayle’s riveting saga sheds new light upon our nation’s founding and the complicated contributions of all the people who made America what it is today. It is, as Audrey Edwards, former editor of Essence magazines, proclaimed a “graphic and sweeping look at how the politics of race and class play out at the highest and lowest levels of American life.”