Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor famous for confirming the centuries-old rumor regarding the relationship and children Thomas Jefferson had with Sally Hemings, an enslaved Black woman he owned. In 1997, she published “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” kicking up dust and starting a heated debate that would result in a reprint the following year with DNA proof as evidence that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings and fathered children by her.
Gordon-Reed grew up in Jim Crow-era Conroe, Texas, and was the first Black child in her elementary school. In her book “On Juneteenth,” her most recent publication released in 2021, she discusses the difficult experiences she had as the first Black child in her school and having to deal with anger and racism coming from white – and in some cases even Black – people.
Gordon-Reed graduated from Dartmouth College in 1981 and Harvard Law School in 1984, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review. While there, she met and married her husband, Robert R. Reed, a justice on the New York Supreme Court.
Gordon-Reed worked as an attorney for seven years before moving from practicing law to teaching it. She has been the Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School and Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University, and is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In 2008, Gordon-Reed published “The Hemingses of Monticello,” which reconstructs four generations of the Hemings family from their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson. The book was praised by critics and won 16 awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in History. Gordon-Reed was the first Black person to be awarded this prize.
In 2010, President Barack Obama honored Annette Gordon-Reed with the National Humanities Medal, the highest national honor for the arts and humanities. Other books she has authored include “Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir” and “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”