Beverly R. Lemos

Beverly R. Lemos was born in Stafford County, Virginia around 1851. According to an 1882 newspaper article, Beverly and his brother Charles H. Lemos were both “sold into slavery down in Georgia” as children and separated from their family; further details regarding his enslavement and subsequent freedom are unclear.¹ 

In 1872, Beverly Lemos began working at the White House as a waiter during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant; his brother, Charles, also worked there as a barber.² Ten years later, newspapers reported that the Lemos brothers’ long-estranged father (who is not named in these articles) was reunited with his sons at work, where the three “had a long talk… in the ante-room of the White House.”³ Outside of work, Lemos was vice president of the Executive Mansion Social Club, a group "composed of the colored employees of the building,” and a member of the Frederick Douglass Relief Association.⁴ It appears that Beverly Lemos continued to work at the White House through part of Benjamin Harrison’s presidency in 1890. He appeared on that year’s government register as a laborer in the War Department among other known White House staff at the time, and on city directories as a waiter. Moreover, according to Esther Singleton’s The Story of the White House, Lemos and White House Coachman Albert Hawkins drove President-elect Harrison and outgoing President Cleveland by carriage to the Capitol on Inauguration Day.⁵ 

Beginning in 1891, city directories and government registers suggest that he worked as a messenger for the Department of the Interior, thus ending his White House service. He continued to work for the U.S. government for the rest of his career.⁶ Beverly R. Lemos died on June 12, 1930, and was buried at Columbian Harmony Payne Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Burials there were later disinterred during Metro construction and moved to National Harmony Memorial Park Cemetery in Maryland.⁷