Home Frontline Season 18 Episode 14

Jefferson's Blood

Frontline · Season 18 · Episode 14
In "Jefferson's Blood," FRONTLINE correspondent Shelby Steele and producer Tom Lennon re-examine Jefferson's life, and piece together the little that can be known about Sally Hemings. Steele and Lennon also explore the repercussions of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship for the couple's modern-day descendants, many of whom are still attempting to find their place along America's blurred color line. "[Jefferson] spawned two lines of descendants--one legitimate, one not," Steele says in the documentary. "And this bastardized part of his family would be driven by a sense of incompleteness."

Episode Details

Air date, runtime, timezone, and episode position.

Season
18
Episode
14
Air Date
02/May/2000
Air Time
22:00
Runtime
86 min

Overview

Episode summary.

In "Jefferson's Blood," FRONTLINE correspondent Shelby Steele and producer Tom Lennon re-examine Jefferson's life, and piece together the little that can be known about Sally Hemings. Steele and Lennon also explore the repercussions of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship for the couple's modern-day descendants, many of whom are still attempting to find their place along America's blurred color line. "[Jefferson] spawned two lines of descendants--one legitimate, one not," Steele says in the documentary. "And this bastardized part of his family would be driven by a sense of incompleteness."

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