By Stacey Patton

When Barack Hussein Obama was elected our 44th president last November, I immediately began to think of a long line of heroic black ancestors whose blood, toil and sacrifices paved the way for this once “skinny kid with a funny name” to make history. In the midst of my joy, their names and faces surged to the forefront of my mind

• Harriet Tubman.
• Nat Turner.
• Denmark Vesey.
• Sojourner Truth.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
• W.E.B. Du Bois.
• Homer Plessy.
• Marcus Garvey.
• Carter G. Woodson.
• A. Philip Randolph.
• Langston Hughes.
• Zora Neale Hurston.
• Malcolm X.
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Medgar Evers.
• Rosa Parks.
• Thurgood Marshall.
• Emmett Till.

And so on.

Chief among those names were former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass and former slave, author and educator Booker T. Washington. I asked myself, what would those great men and women think of this transformative moment? What would they say about Barack Obama? About America?

And then I asked, how could I describe my feelings to my ancestors?

That’s what one Atlanta woman and her son, descendants of Douglass and Washington, were asked to do in a recent documentary on the inauguration. On the eve of the inauguration, Nettie Washington Douglass, great-granddaughter of Booker T. Washington and great great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass, and her son Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., wrote to the most important African-American leaders in U.S. history and described their feelings.

See what the mother and son had to say in the Newsweek video: “Beyond Words: Two Heirs to Two Great Americans.”