Jocelind Edwards Julien was born in 1962 in Washington, DC, the youngest of three children of Rose Gangemi Edwards (1935-2021) and Marshall Edwards, Jr. (1931-2016). Through her father, she is a direct descendant of Caroline Branham, George and Martha Washington’s personal enslaved maid. Caroline Branham’s great-great granddaughter was Rosa Branham Shorter, matriarch to the Shorter-Dorsey family who lived on Broad Branch Road for more than half a century. Rosa Shorter was Jocelind’s great grandmother.
Since Jocelind’s grandmother was born on Broad Branch, she is just two generations separated from the family’s long-time land holdings on Broad Branch Road. The family home at 5801 Broad Branch Road NW that sat on .38 acres was seized by the DC government in 1931 to build Lafayette Elementary School, then for white children only. The Shorter/Dorsey house sat about where the basketball court is today.
The Dorseys and Shorters were African Americans, and Jocelind was born to interracial parents – her mother was Italian American and her father was African American. The family first lived in a single-family house in Silver Spring, MD, but because of their mixed marriage, they experienced considerable racial discrimination there. The story was told of how a rental agent turned down Jocelind’s father for a house, but welcomed the application for the same house when later made by her mother. By the late 1960s, the family yearned to break free of those racist strictures and moved to the newly created town of Columbia, MD, a planned community designed by James Rouse.
Jocelind recalled a happy childhood there, playing in open fields with neighboring children of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, and attending public schools. After high school, she moved to Boston then New York City to pursue a career in dance. It was in New York that she met her husband, Christopher Julien. But soon, the rising crime rates of the 1980s drove them both out, back to the more restful spaces of Columbia where they pursued careers and started a family. Their twins, Christopher and Megan, are now 22.
Jocelind earned a degree in business management and psychology from the University of Maryland, and since the 1990s has served as an alternative dispute resolution practitioner. She is now the director and mediator for the Anne Arundel County Office of the State’s Attorney and still lives in Columbia.
Although nearly 100 years have passed, the family connection to the Broad Branch Road land was relatively recent. Jocelind’s paternal grandmother, Anna Shorter Edwards Chambers (1905-2007), was born there and raised for a time at the house with her siblings. Their parents – Jocelind’s great grandparents – were Rosa Branham Shorter (1882-1971) and Richard Shorter (1879-1965). Jocelind knew her great-grandmother, Rosa, before she passed away in 1971, and was especially close to her grandmother, Anna, who lived to be 102.
Luckily for historians, Anna was an avid photographer of family and friends throughout her long life. In the 1990s, during conversations with Anna, Jocelind was able to carefully document and identify many photographs from Anna’s collection. Jocelind’s older brother, Mark, has preserved and digitized the family’s photo collection. Their family has graciously given permission for some of these photographs to accompany her interviews to vividly illustrate the lives of the Black families who lived and thrived in the Broad Branch Road community.
Intriguing family stories handed down through the generations had much to do with Jocelind’s burgeoning accomplishments as a genealogist. She has succeeded in tracing her family’s history back through the generations – and not just to Broad Branch but to enslaved people associated with George Washington and to Washington’s adopted grandson George Washington Parke Custis, known to the family as “Washy,” and Robert E. Lee.
It was with simple happenstance that Jocelind learned in early 2021 of the Broad Branch history project that involved her family. When she typed “Broad Branch” into her search engine, she found Historic Chevy Chase DC‘s 2016 interview of James Fisher and Tanya Hardy. She came to learn that her family – the Dorsey-Shorter family – had been next door neighbors to Fisher’s ancestors for half a century along Broad Branch Road. But due to that long-ago racial displacement, his family and hers had become complete strangers – proof of the social damage such racist actions inflict on generations of people. With this newfound connection, Jocelind emailed Tanya just in time to be included in this oral history project, and to attend the June 2021 dedication of Lafayette-Pointer Park and Recreation Center.
Jocelind recalls many conversations in which her grandmother, Anna, expressed deep and nostalgic attachment to the Broad Branch property. Flipping through the photos, you can see shots of her girlhood friends and family. Among them is one of Anna looking smart and proud in her Chevy Chase Country Club uniform where she had worked, often looking after the young Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Toward the end of Anna’s life, after living in many interesting places, she would plead to be taken back to her home, and, when asked where that was, she would say, “Chevy Chase.”
Excerpts from Jocelind’s two oral history interviews from March 2021:
On her early childhood and upbringing in an interracial family: Mom and Dad raised us with traditional values, family values. Hard work pays off. Race goes not to the swiftest, but he or she who endures. So I had a lot of good lessons in life. My siblings and I were very close. In fact, we often went on camping trips up north, my father would pack us all in and we’d head up north and spend about a month in Maine and Canada. Just traveling around and being free, which was extra important for my mom and dad. They had a lot of trials and tribulations because they were an interracial couple. My mom being Italian, my father being African American. And so for them, that was the time to get away from all (the) racism that they’ve had to endure in their life and in their marriage. And, in so doing, keeping us away from the negatives that we as children, as mixed-race children, had to endure.
On her early experiences with race discrimination and the family’s move to Columbia, MD: I should probably include this, which I think is pretty profound. We were renting. We were going to rent in Silver Spring from DC. And my mother and father, let’s see, I think it was my father came in. But they weren’t going to rent when they found out they were mixed-race couples. So somehow, my mother went back on another day a different person was sitting. And they said, “Oh, sure, we’ll rent to you. Absolutely, it’s available.” And I think that was another stick in the craw, if you will, for them as an interracial couple. But shortly after that, several years after that, I think I was seven or so, we opted to move to the new town of Columbia, Maryland. Columbia was built by James Rouse, who envisioned a city, a town, if you will, a community where everybody can reside next to one another. That was its intent. And so I would say that my younger years were filled with freedom in a way that we probably couldn’t have had, at least in Silver Spring at that time, we’re talking about the late ’60s. So it was very liberating, to be able to interact with all kids of all walks of life, and not be targeted, you know, in a racially derogatory way. So we’d run, yeah, we were on the fields, we were on—you know, all the open space was idyllic. Very idyllic. So I went through school here in Columbia, through my formative years . . .
On derogatory name-calling, and identifying as African American: [T]here was a time in my school years, early school years, where when some of the kids caught sight of my mother, I got called a lot of names, a lot of derogatory names. And so that, it never shook my belief in who I was, but it hurt a lot. You know, it hurt a lot to continually be called derogatory names. But ironically, it never shook who I was, and I never had remorse for who my parents are, or who they were. I just never, I never regretted that. I never said, Well, I wish I was this, or I wish I was that. I always knew myself, first and foremost, to be an African American woman, which was, which was my identifier, so to speak, but I was also biracial, half Italian and half African American. Of course, now that I’ve done DNA [laughs], the percentages are choppy. [They laugh.]
On her early interest in genealogy, from conversations with her grandmother, Anna: I started because my grandmother, Anna Shorter Edwards Chambers, on my father’s side, my paternal grandmother, would always tell me—more so me than say, my sister, even my brother, she would always tell us, you know, you’re related to George Washington. And she would give me little tidbits here and there. But I was so young.
And I didn’t—first of all, we didn’t have the means to just tap a button like we do on a computer and look up what she’s talking about. In fact, I don’t think I ever uttered the word genealogy at that point. I just sort of figured she’s given me this information, but I couldn’t understand why, or even how to make the connection. But later in life, I would say it was probably in my, maybe my latter 20s or so, I started getting interested because my grandmother, who was still alive, would share some more tidbits. So, I sat down with her on several occasions and interviewed her. And I wrote notes upon notes. If she skipped around, I would write them–jot them down. Not sure what I was going to actually do. But I knew enough to say that what she has experienced, and what she knows is important. So that sort of was my initiation into the interest of genealogy.
And from there, I would make trips to the archives, which was daunting. [They laugh.] I just remember standing in that building thinking, I don’t know what I’m doing. I was ill prepared. I did not prepare myself adequately for that first visit. But I’ve continued to interview. In fact, I’d interviewed—one of the side effects members, family members, they’re a very large family in Arlington, Virginia. In any event, I don’t want to get off track, but I continued to conduct interviews. And from there, my interest just grew. It peaked and waned. I’ll be honest, there were times—I had twins 19, 20 years ago, 20 years ago. And so I put it down for a good while.
On her move from Boston to New York City: I lived in Cambridge, MA, which was great. But it had a lot of transient people coming in to attend. You know, Boston University, Harvard and whatnot. So it was, it was different. But when I went to work in Boston, it was Boston. Literally, it was Boston. And I didn’t, I didn’t find a lot of diversity where that was concerned. Could I have given Cambridge a little bit more opportunity? Perhaps. But it was, I found the area in which I was in, for obvious reasons, a little bit more collegiate. I was looking for something more expansive, and darn it if New York didn’t answer that call, [they laugh] on all fronts. That for me was the most liberating moment in landing in New York City. It offered the diversity it offered artistic freedom. Independent freedom. Everybody was different. Oh, what a feast for me.
On the inadequacy of African-American curriculum in her children’s education: The concern I had was the brevity of the curriculum, in that they would talk about George Washington, they’d talk about Lincoln, they’d talk about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, they would talk about those things. But what was lacking— oh, and they also talked about the enslaved, no doubt, and emancipation. But they never focused on details, and the responsibility of those who enslaved African Americans, or people of African descent. They didn’t talk about the Buffalo Soldiers who contributed greatly to the Civil War, to the wars and to the civil war. And they didn’t talk about a lot of what went on during slavery. They certainly didn’t talk about the enslaved women who bore the masters’ children. They didn’t talk about any of that. They didn’t talk about the rations that they received, each year, that being a pair of very rough fabric clothing. And if they were lucky, you know, leggings that were actually warm. And it’s just things like that. Yeah, they talked about Martin Luther King, but they didn’t talk about all the other contributors. And they never touched Malcolm X. They never touched him, you know. So it’s— yeah, they didn’t talk a lot about that.
On her grandmother, Anna’s, life on Broad Branch Road: It was my grandmother, who actually spent time living there for a short while she lived there with— she lived there with her mother, and siblings. By that point, she was younger. So she lived there for a time. [. . . .] And so when they had children, my grandmother was one of them and spent her youth there at Chevy Chase. I shouldn’t say Chevy Chase, but Broad Branch. I got interested in it. Really interested to find more about it, just recently, within this past year, and didn’t learn of this initiative until a couple of months ago. Which of course, I started scrambling because I thought I didn’t do enough research into our names. [. . . .] So I went back to my notes to read about all that my grandmother shared. So yeah, this is well, but I knew it was something because when my grandmother got older, the only one place that she asked to go was Chevy Chase. The only one place out of all of the places that she ever lived, and all of her experiences traveling and whatnot, Chevy Chase was the one place she asked to go back home to.
On the family’s multiple evictions by eminent domain: As children, we were not made aware of it, again, until I got older and interviewed my grandmother, and only then did she start talking about that aspect. It was common knowledge, though, that my same great grandmother lost her home in what was that? Irving street in Washington DC. So that was taken by eminent domain also to build a school. So that was the second time for her losing the home. Her and her husband had to, you know, pick everything up and leave. And then do it a second time, which was like I can’t even fathom that. [….]
And it all started in Arlington house, where the same great great grandmother, my great great grandmother lost whose house was lost due to eminent domain on Broad Branch also lost the property that her father, Guy Henry, had in Arlington to build Arlington National Cemetery. So yes, it’s— three times losing our home. But because we are very proud people, it was nothing they ever let stop them from moving on, continuing to work, make a home and a family and maintain their pride. You know, keep that intact.
On her feeling when learning the history of the Broad Branch Road Black community: It fills me with great pride in my family, and in who I am. It makes me want to share and to be their voice for all that they experienced. Sometimes it makes me feel sad in a way for some of the negative things they experienced. Sometimes it makes me angry, too. But they would say, don’t let anger eat away at you. It’s senseless. Rather, become someone, do something, make something of yourself make us proud. So it’s my hope that in doing this, I can tell a story or tell their story, you know, and what they experienced and finally be able to do it without any negative consequences that they would have suffered.
On her grandmother’s photo collection, family friend Bessie, and life on Broad Branch Road: [Bessie] was a close family friend. The families that lived on Broad Branch all knew one another, of course. But she was a family friend and grew up with my grandmother. And it’s funny because I’ve got pictures of her at different stages of life. There’s some where she’s a lot younger, this one when she was getting into preteens, one where she graduated from college. [Laughs.] So but the families were all connected—the Harris family that originated from the Pointer family. We know they— in fact, I’ve got, let me see—I don’t know if I printed out. I’m on my phone, let me see— I may not have printed it out. But I have a picture of Lucille Harris, who was playing with my grandmother’s brother, when they were no more than maybe five, six years old. Back on Broad Branch. It’s a captivating picture. Remind me to show it to you on the next—I’ll have it prepared for you to show.
[Q]: It’s amazing you have all these photos— You said in our pre-interview that it was your grandmother who— photographer?
JOCELIND JULIEN: Yeah. Yeah, it’s how she had the forethought to do that is remarkable. But I guess that’s her way of archiving our story, which is immeasurable, you know, it’s absolutely immeasurable and it’s funny because my brother took after her. He’s the family photographer […] and he took after her. But she took pictures of everything. How— to give you an idea, there’s a picture that we have of another neighborhood friend of hers, Pearl Bailey, when she was just, you know, maybe 8, 9, 10— Do y’all know who Pearl Bailey is?
On the question of reparations: So as it pertains to Broad Branch, I think, correcting the narrative of what happened. And certainly, since the school is what replaced our family’s homes, to put it within the curriculum and the history of the school to write that narrative of what happened. And to name the families that were there, and uprooted. I think that for me would be a great start.
On a top-down approach to education, coupled with small groups like this: I think, in talking about the top-down approach, it was geared more toward a response to what needs to happen with the Board of Education. But to raise awareness, it has to start small, and it does need to be working our way from bottom up. So I think having these conversations like this with these groups is perfect. You know, and something that really, quite frankly, I didn’t see myself necessarily involved in, say, 20 years ago. Because I didn’t realize that a lot of these existed, that there was interest amongst a wide variety of group members. Because it can’t, it shouldn’t be just one group looking at this, it really needs to be a wide variety of people. [….] So I think that by networking, and creating these groups, it helps because now we’ve got three people here. And because this is recorded, now this is going to reach a wider audience, and so on, and so on, and so forth.
And I think that it’s very beneficial to have the opportunity to create forums like this, to get this word out, to get people to start to think, you know. And I’m quite sure that this discussion is going to reach somebody who may not know about eminent domain and what happened, you know, and they’re going to maybe figure out, does this happen elsewhere? So it’s going to reach some folks who otherwise maybe wouldn’t know about this. So yeah, this is wonderful. And that’s the very reason why I signed on, to give voice to whatever knowledge I have.
Closing thoughts on sharing her family’s story: I feel the emotion welling up inside of me. Yeah, and it’s unusual to experience this. Usually I’m on my own or, you know, sharing it with family. But this means a lot to me, to be able to share my story and my thoughts and beliefs. So this is an important step, not only for what you all are doing, but for myself as well. So I, gosh, I thank you all for listening to me.