The Ordeal of Monticello

"Television correspondent Shannon Lanier is a direct descendant of Sally Hemings through her son, Madison Hemings. 'It's been an interesting journey for me, because it started out when I was a kid, me standing up in class and saying, "Thomas Jefferson is my great-great- great-great-great-great grandfather," and being so happy and proud to brag about it when we're studying the presidents. But then the teacher says, "Sit down and stop telling lies," and all the kids laugh at you.'
"By the mid-1990s the laughing had stopped. Historians even at Monticello were becoming believers. Lanier was 19 when he attended the controversial, first-ever combined Hemings-Jefferson family reunion at Monticello in 1999. 'Before that reunion, I had only known the Hemings descendants from the Madison line of the family,' he said."

Martha Teichner of CBS News reports on recent chronicles about Thomas Jefferson and slavery.

And in The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler discusses debates over Jefferson, and Paul Finkelman denounces the third president.