Changing racial lines was the focus of two descendants of President Thomas Jefferson as they spoke to an audience of about 200 Wednesday evening.

Shay Banks-Young and Julia Jefferson are genetically confirmed offspring of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave at Jefferson’s Virginia home. They presented “Race and Family in America: A Conversation in Black and White,” in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union as part of the Women’s Week festivities at Iowa State.

The speech was an example of the blurring of borders between races, introductory speaker Gloria Jones-Johnson said.

“We are forced to confront and challenge the boundaries of the `one-drop’ rule and forge a new reality for black and white people,” said Jones-Johnson, professor of sociology.

After taking the audience through a visualization of the journey many slaves took from Africa to the auctioning block, Jefferson and Banks-Young presented a detailed family tree illustrating their lineage from the African slave to their own children. Revealing the drama surrounding the Hemings-Jefferson affair, they told of Hemings’s dealings with Jefferson and her agreement to continued slavery in return for her children’s freedom.

Banks-Young and Jefferson also discussed the different ways the children of Hemings and Jefferson went. Some became integrated into white communities, while others retained their black heritage. They talked about the different ways they were raised – Banks-Young as black, Jefferson as white.

“Over the last couple of years since we met each other we really realized the differences in the ways our lives have been,” Banks-Young said. “[My family] grew up black. We were black, and America treated us that way.”

Jefferson described a life far different than Banks-Young’s.

“I had no experience with the black community growing up,” she said. “My parents wouldn’t allow me to play with black children. I don’t know if my father even knew he had Sally Hemings as an ancestor.”

The women, after meeting for the first time on the set of the Oprah Winfrey show in 1998, said their family story was pieced together from both documents and oral history.

“I’ve always known through my family,” Banks-Young said. “We didn’t need a book.”

Jefferson’s side of the family, on the other hand, had only a partial paper trail to follow.

“I didn’t even know I was related to Jefferson when I was growing up,” she said.

An interactive question-and-answer session followed the presentation, during which one of the audience members informed Banks-Young and Jefferson that he might also be able to trace his family back to Jefferson and Hemings. They said they encounter relatives quite often in their travels.

“The known family is close to 2,000 people,” Jefferson said.