Two Branches, One Name - The Congresswoman and the Pioneer
Two centuries after a Plaskett ran a Caribbean plantation, a Plaskett represents those islands in Congress.
In the halls of Congress, Delegate Stacey Plaskett represents the U.S. Virgin Islands — the same Caribbean islands where Major Joseph Plaskett once ran a rum and sugar plantation worked by enslaved Africans.
When emancipation came, some of those enslaved people took their master’s surname. Their descendants — the African American Plasketts of the Virgin Islands — carried that name through generations of freedom.
Stacey Plaskett, born in Brooklyn to Virgin Islands parents, became the first woman and first African American to represent the territory in Congress. She graduated from Georgetown Law, served in the Justice Department, and rose to national prominence.
Meanwhile, the California Plasketts — descendants of William Lucas Plaskett, who crossed the Delaware with Washington and ranched on the Big Sur coast — carry the same surname through a completely different historical path.
One family name. Two radically different American journeys. The descendants of those who owned and the descendants of those who were owned, now both prominent Americans.
This is the complexity of American history, written in a single surname: PLASKETT.