By Grant Pick
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The Whittaker will also enabled Williams to become a certified member of the International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry, the volunteer-run group he cofounded. Based in a small office on 95th Street in Beverly, the group seeks to bind present-day slave descendants to their forebears, most three or four generations removed. “This isn’t to say we approve of slavery, but it helps us be proud of who we are,” says Williams of the nation’s only slave-lineage society.
Members like Williams, who serves as the organization’s treasurer, not only authenticate slave antecedents but amass photographs and stories involving them. “They’ve turned up some absolutely marvelous pictures and stories which trace the journey of African-Americans through history,” says Michael Flug, senior archivist at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library. The Harsh collection is the official repository of the society’s work.
Jo Ann Page, the society’s secretary, traces her paternal line back to her great-grandfather Joseph Lynch, a slave to a Cherokee Indian who, once freed, served as a Union soldier. Page, a former first-grade teacher, found her proof in the testimony that Lynch gave before a 1905 federal commission taking the final rolls of the Cherokee Nation in what later became the state of Oklahoma.
