First Lady Michelle Obama’s Family Tree Rooted in Slavery
In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year- old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.
In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was
Fraser Robinson III and his wife, Marian, with Craig and Michelle, now first lady Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama's family tree highlights the complicated racial intermingling in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. (Obama Campaign 2008 via The New York Times)
torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.
In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated two years before
the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.
Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said. During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Obama’s roots remained a mystery.
White forebear confirmed
The newly discovered story of Obama’s maternal ancestors — the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency. The findings — uncovered by Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist, and The New York Times — substantiate what Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear.
While
President Barack Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.”She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives — the descendants of his white, slave- owning ancestors — when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”
“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites
and blacks in America,” Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”The outlines of Obama’s family history unfolded from 19th-century probate records, yellowing marriage licenses, fading photographs and the recollections of elderly women who remember the family. Of the dozens of relatives she identified, Smolen yak said, it was the slave girl who seemed to call out most clearly.
New masters, then children
When her owner, David Patterson, died in 1852, Melvinia soon found herself on a 200-acre farm with new masters: Patterson’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. Whether Melvinia labored in the house or in the fields, there was no shortage of work: wheat, corn, sweet potatoes and cotton to plant and harvest, and three horses, five cows, 17 pigs and 20 sheep to care for, according to an 1860 agricultural survey.
It is difficult to say who might have impregnated Melvinia, who gave birth to Dolphus around 1859, when she was perhaps as young as 15. At the time, Henry Shields was in his late 40s and had four sons ages 19 to 24, but other men may have spent time on the farm as well.
“No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience,” said Jason Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves.
In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their masters’ surnames.
Even after she was freed, Melvinia stayed put, working as a farm laborer on land adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry’s sons.
But sometime in her 30s or 40s, census records show, Melvinia broke away and managed to reunite with former slaves from her childhood on the Patterson estate: Mariah and Bolus Easley, who settled with Melvinia in Bartow Country, near the Alabama border.
Dolphus married one of the Easleys’ daughters, Alice, who is Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandmother.
Sometime before 1888, Dolphus and Alice Shields continued the migration, heading to Birmingham, a boomtown with a rumbling railroad, iron and steel mines and factories that attracted former slaves and their children from across the South.
Robert Lee Shields, Obama’s great-grandfather, married Annie Lawson in 1906 and worked as a laborer and a railroad porter but disappeared from the public record sometime around his 32nd birthday.
Up North, Dolphus’ grandson, a painter named Purnell Shields, Obama’s grandfather, was positioning his family to seize the widening opportunities in Chicago.
But as his descendants moved forward, they lost touch with the past. Today, Dolphus Shields lies in a neglected black cemetery, where patches of grass grow knee-high and many tombstones have toppled. Source:TheDenverPost.com
Forwomenonline.com
When I initially heard about this, the thought of someone digging into a person’s past for journalistic purposes left a bad taste in my mouth. But after having read the actual NYT story, I commend the reporter on the thorough and well-written piece that emerged as result of the genealogical findings.
It is objective, factually-based and has a potent human interest angle without being controversial for the sake of creating scandal.
This video http://www.newsy.com/videos/michelle_obama_s_slave_roots has a broad range of reactions to the story but I especially like how the reporter explains how the White House was constantly in the loop during the storywriting process so Michelle Obama had time to process the story or even veto any information if she so chose (which she didn’t).