Thomas Jefferson’s complicated family history has never been a secret. Now, one of his Black descendants has been laid to rest at Monticello, the Virginia estate where the president enslaved Sally Hemings. The historic moment comes as new DNA research provides what researchers say is definitive genetic proof that Jefferson fathered her children.
On Sept. 12, Gayle Jessup White buried the cremated remains of her older brother, Cedric B. “Dickie” Jessup Jr., in the Jefferson family graveyard–making him the first Black person buried there in its more than 200-year history, according to The New York Times. It was a small burial with an enormous family history behind it.
Jessup was born in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 6, 1939. He had intellectual disabilities and spent much of his life institutionalized, according to The News Virginian. In his final years, he lived in a group home. He died in 2020 from complications of COVID-19.
Although he didn’t spend his life debating Jefferson’s legacy or fighting over the family tree, Jessup’s death allowed his sister to confront a question that has followed their family for generations: Who gets to claim Jefferson’s family history?
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“It is our right to be buried in that space. And it is wrong that for more than 200 years, that space has been the domain of white Americans,” White told The Richmond Times. “There are Black Americans who are descended from Thomas Jefferson, and we have as much right to be buried in that cemetery as anyone else.”
We previously told you that a 15-year DNA investigation confirmed that Jefferson more than likely fathered Hemings ‘ children. Now, Jefferson’s Black descendants are taking their proper place in the founding father’s legacy.
White is a direct descendant of Jefferson and Hemings, according to The Times. Jefferson and his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, were her fifth great-grandparents. Peter Hemings, whom Jefferson enslaved, and his wife, Betsy, were her third great-grandparents.
That complicated lineage gave White and her siblings the right to burial in the Monticello Graveyard. But White wasn’t sure she wanted it.
“Those are my relatives, but they’re not my family,” she told the outlet of her initial thoughts. She questioned whether the cemetery, long associated with Jefferson’s white descendants, was where her Black family belonged.
But after attending her first meeting of the Monticello Association in June 2025, White began to see the cemetery differently and realized that the family she knew had a right to be laid to rest there.
“I decided that we should be the ones to break that color barrier,” White continued. “There should not be color barriers in the United States of America — not in a cemetery, not anyplace else. So that’s one of the reasons I decided to do it: Because we were in a position to do so, and it was time to break it.”
Her son, Charles Jessup Franklin, encouraged her to make the burial happen, according to The Times. Together, they chose a spot visible from the walkway so that Jessup would not be tucked away or hidden.
Rob Eppes, a white Jefferson descendant and former president of the Monticello Association, personally dug Jessup’s grave. For Eppes, the act was part of his own “healing journey” as a descendant of a slaveholding family.
For White, it was something more direct: a brother coming home.
Jessup’s grave now sits among more than 300 others at Monticello. His presence there doesn’t erase the contradictions of Jefferson’s family history. It makes those contradictions impossible to ignore.
