From: Jerry Reavey
Date: 2/25/00
Time: 8:52:09 AM
Remote Name: 155.247.150.13
Jerry Reavey Hist 67 2/2000
Weekly Assignment #6
Benjamin Banneker was an African-American scientist whose family rose from slavery and prospered. He is called "the first Negro man of science". After the Banneker family was liberated, its members organized other freed slaves and helped work on a free-plantation growing tobacco. It was very profitable, which certainly helped Benjamin pursue an education. As a youth, his grandmother taught him how to read. He excelled in school, and became fascinated with the mechanisms and measurements of clocks, which he applied to making advanced mathematical calculations and surveying the stars. Later in life, he wrote and published an almanac of astronomy, which is what Jefferson refers to in his letter. Jefferson wrote this letter in response to receiving a copy of this almanac. Jefferson seems excited by the prospect that a poor boy from a slave family could prove wrong those white Americans who dismissed all blacks as mentally lacking. Jefferson was very impressed with this work, praised Banneker as a credit to his race, and even forwarded his work to the Science Academy in Paris.