Karen Pannell Kellibrew, an eight-generation direct descendant of Capt. George Pointer, was a Daddy’s girl all her young life. Love and devotion to family runs deep in her veins, so it was a shock for her to discover an entire family history she knew nothing about.
Born in 1965 to Robert Earl Pannell (1944-2003) and Betty Ann Coombs Pannell, Karen said she and her older brother Robert had an idyllic childhood growing up in Oxon Hill, MD. Her mother, now retired, worked for the Census Bureau and her father the Government Printing Office. It was a given that every evening the children would sit down to dinner with their parents.
When she got home from school at 3:30 p.m. she was required to do homework and chores. But once her mother arrived home at 5:30 p.m. she was free to play outside until supper. Favorite games were jump rope, jacks, and hop-scotch. “I cannot relate to any kind of hardship,” she explains of her worry-free youth. “I did not see violence. Maybe there were fights but no guns.”
Nor was her young education burdened with heavy historical truths. In fact the only Black history she recalls being taught at school was about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She preferred math and English and after graduating from Oxon Hill High School in 1982 she studied business administration at Prince George’s Community College.
Her plans to transfer to the University of Maryland were sidetracked when her father became ill and she was needed at home. Despite this setback, she has had a successful career, starting at the U.S. Cenus Bureau then at the United Mine Workers Union. But her most formative time was the 24 years she spent with the American Postal Workers Union. Afterwards, she worked at another union office in Bethesda, commuting from her Capitol Heights home, until she recently left the workforce.
Her husband of 13 years, William C. Kellibrew, passed away last May at age 70. They had bought a home together and also explored this family journey of discovery together. The importance of family connections, she says, cannot be understated. She rarely names a success without giving credit to mentors in her family. In her professional life, she said she credits much of her success to several strong aunts.
Growing up, Karen was close to her father’s side of the family. Every Sunday, they would go to dinner at her paternal grandparents’ home at 17th and East Capitol streets in Northeast DC. Through her teenage years she spent happy summers with them in their retirement home in Halifax, VA. And throughout her childhood, there were numerous family reunions with her father’s family.
Karen also had a strong relationship with her maternal grandmother, Martha Ann Harris Coombs (1922-2015) and her mother’s four brothers. She is particularly proud of her Uncle Alvin Thomas Coombs (1941-1995) who after enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1959, played Army football and was reputed to be among the most talented running backs. Promoted to staff sergeant, he was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where he was wounded and honorably discharged with the Purple Cross, the Gallantry Cross with Bronze Star issued by the South Vietnamese Government, and the U. S. Army commendation medal of “V” (Valor). He also served as a member of the National Guard Unit at Arlington National Cemetery.
But there were other members of her mother’s extended family that Karen knew little about. That all changed when she attended a family meeting at her mother’s house and met her mother’s first cousin, James Fisher, for the first time. James, along with his friend, geneologist Tanya Hardy, revealed to them they were part of a proud lineage dating back to a formerly enslaved man named George Pointer and shared with them Pointer’s astounding accomplishments.
She also learned the sad truth of the family’s racial displacement as legitimate landowners from Chevy Chase DC – currently some of the most expensive real estate in the city. She has since come to realize that her grandmother Martha Ann Harris Coombs was one of last living descendants who had been raised on the family compound in Chevy Chase.
She says that initially, the knowledge of this connection was interesting. But it has grown increasingly important in her life – that she is part of a blood line that survived so many obstacles – from slavery, to displacement, to forgotten and then found. “I was even more excited when we had the family reunion at Lafayette Park, and we had the big sign that said ‘Descendants of George Pointer.’ That was great. We never have had a family reunion on my mother’s side before … I do not share it with a lot of people, but I am kind of proud now that I know.”
The reunion of George Pointer descendants occurred in 2015 at the old family homesite, now Lafayette-Pointer Park, attracting dozens of newly discovered relatives, many of whom were meeting each other for the first time. Unbeknowns to her, some of her cousins lived “right around the corner” from her. Since then, they have been gathering for casual family events. She only wishes that her maternal grandmother – then too ill to go anywhere – and deceased uncles and cousins, could have attended the reunion.
When asked how she thinks the legacy should be treated, she said she would like to see the full story taught in DC schools and that people in the community should know the history. “Everybody knows about Lafayette Park … but do they know that it has been renamed and why, and who (George Pointer) was and why we renamed it for him? What’s the story? Do they know the story? “
Excerpts from Karen’s oral history interviews in Spring 2021:
On who Goerge Pointer was: He was born a slave and was one for 19 years. …He was a captain. He wrote a letter to the president or directors of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal back in 1829. And he had the good fortune to get in the good graces of his masters, the engineers in the company. And so what happened was they would pay him $300 in a given time for his hard work, but what happened was that he was an experienced and reliable worker for the Potomac Company. He worked first as a laborer at the Great Falls and Little Falls. And then later, when he was 23, he was put in charge of the boats that transported large construction items down the river. Later, he bought his own riverboats, and was running them in Potomac Park, so he established wealth then. And this may have been when people began referring to him as Captain Pointer. He later becomes a supervisor engineer.
How she characterizes the repercussions to the family – the Harrises in 1920s as well as today’s descendants – of being forced off the Broad Branch Road property: “My grandmother (who was divorced) was raising five children alone and she struggled throughout her life. (Luckily) my mother fell in love with my dad, married, and together they made a very good life for me and my brother. But, when I think about it now, I realize that my grandmother or somebody else in the family could have lived there without being in a run-down high-rise building, or instead of going to the nursing home. She could have been on family land and being taken care of. You know, you think about stuff like that because, you have a lot of people that have land or property and they leave it — and it becomes a historical family house or whatever. So yeah, when you think about it now and realize what has happened, that could have been something that my grandmother could have had. ..You wouldn’t have to worry about it, the house would have been paid for and the land and the history behind it. And the fact that it was still our land, family land, it would be worth so much more money today.
About creating greater public awareness of how Blacks were too ofen denied the opportunity to build generational weath when they deserved it after having owned the land for 80 years before being pushed off: “It (the wealth in the land) could have been trickled down. . .We could have had so much more (today). My mother, when she got older, she was determined to make a better life for herself. But my grandmother didn’t have a lot. I got married, and I’m a homeowner, and when you’re a homeowner you have more of a sense of a – you know, a sense of (pride of possession in the land). Because it’s something – it’s yours, it’s your property. You know, and nobody can take it from you.”