A Portland high school teacher found an old photograph in a thrift store that led her to uncover a buried family secret connecting her great-great-grandmother to one of the most influential Black leaders in American history. Sarah Mitchell was browsing a thrift store on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard on a rainy Saturday when she spotted an aged black-and-white photograph wedged between a cracked vase and a box of postcards. The image showed a group of roughly a dozen Black men and women standing in what appeared to be a New York port area, dressed formally and holding luggage. Sarah, who teaches American history, immediately recognized the face of the young woman third from the left.
It was Elellanar, her great-great-grandmother. But standing beside her was someone who made no sense at all: Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most prominent Black leader in America at the turn of the century. The back of the photograph bore a stamp reading “J.
Morrison, photography, New York, 1903. ”
Sarah purchased the photograph for two dollars and spent the following days digging through archives. At the Multnomah County Library, she found a September 15, 1903 article from the New York Age newspaper headlined “Professor Washington recruits teachers and crafts people for Tuskegee Institute, 30 selected for Journey South. ” The article described how Washington had personally interviewed and selected Black teachers, artisans, and craftspeople to join the staff at Tuskegee.
She then found a letter dated August 12, 1903, from Washington’s office addressed to an “Elellanar Jackson” in New York City. The letter confirmed that Jackson had been selected to join Tuskegee as an instructor in sewing and domestic arts, with a start date of October 1, 1903. A second letter, dated September 20, 1903, acknowledged her withdrawal from the position just days before the photograph was taken. Sarah traveled to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where an archivist helped her trace what had happened.
Church records revealed that Elellanar Jackson married a man named Thomas Hayes on September 24, 1903, just days before she was scheduled to leave for Tuskegee. Thomas Hayes had died six months later, on March 17, 1904, at age 26, in an industrial accident at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He had been a carpenter, and records suggested he was also part of the Tuskegee recruitment group. Baptismal records showed that Elellanar gave birth to a daughter, Ruth Hayes, on May 3, 1904, two months after Thomas’s death.
One week after Ruth’s baptism, on June 12, 1904, Elellanar married James Foster, the man her family had always believed was Ruth’s father. Sarah concluded that Elellanar gave up her position at Tuskegee to marry Thomas, and after his death, remarried quickly out of necessity as a widowed mother with an infant. The family erased Thomas Hayes from their history to build a new life, and the connection to Booker T. Washington was lost for over a century.
A historian at Howard University confirmed with “near certainty” that the man in the photograph was Booker T. Washington, matching other images from the same period. The Tuskegee University archives found no employment record for Elellanar Jackson but confirmed her name in Washington’s correspondence. Sarah created an exhibition at the Multnomah County Library titled “The Photograph and the Dream: Elellanar Jackson’s Journey from Tuskegee to Philadelphia,” displaying the photograph alongside the recruitment letter, marriage certificate, death records, and census entries.
She also connected with descendants of Thomas Hayes, who had no knowledge of this lost family branch, and together they visited Hayes’s grave in Brooklyn. Sarah’s grandmother, now 82, attended the exhibition opening and saw the photograph of her grandmother for the first time. The family has worked to preserve Elellanar’s story, and Sarah has begun speaking at schools about the importance of researching family history.
She continues to piece together the stories of others in the photograph, noting that some recruits went on to careers at Tuskegee while others, like Elellanar, were diverted by the unexpected turns of their lives.