The impossible task of truth and reconciliation

Karen Hughes White searched for Robert Hughes for 30 years. Her grandfather’s brother wasn’t listed alongside his other siblings in the 1910 census records. She searched elsewhere, too — coroner’s inquests, news accounts, grand jury summons. Within the family, it was said that Robert Hughes simply “went off.”

White is a researcher of African American history, including that of the Hughes family, who are descendants of Thomas Jefferson. Robert Hughes’s absence from that history made her suspect that he might have been lynched, both because of how he seemed to vanish...