A surviving shack along road once known as Slave Street on a South Carolina plantation. Michelle Obama's great-great-grandfather, who was born around 1850, lived as a slave, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling rice plantation. (Tribune photo by Alex Garcia / November 22, 2008)
by Frank James (Updated with comment from genealogical expert who researched Obama family history.)
Michelle Obama's roots can be traced back to slaves on a South Carolina rice plantation which makes her becoming the next first lady deeply poignant since, as my colleague Dahleen Glanton points out in a piece on the future first lady's slave heritage, the White House was built by slaves.
One curious aspect of Dahleen's report was this:
Barack Obama's campaign hired genealogists to research the family's roots at the onset of his presidential bid, but aides have largely kept the findings secret. Genealogists at Lowcountry Africana, a research center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, scoured documents to put together a 120-page report, according to project director Toni Carrier. She said the center signed a confidentiality agreement and is not allowed to disclose the findings publicly.
However, in his now-famous speech on race during the primary, Barack Obama stated he was "married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners."
Obama aides declined to discuss the report or allow Michelle Obama to be interviewed about her ancestry. She has said she knew little about her family tree before the campaign, but census reports, property records and other historical documents show that her paternal ancestors bore witness to one of the most shameful chapters in American history.
Considering how extraordinarily open President-elect Obama has been about his past and family history in his two memoirs, it's striking that Michelle Obama's ancestry is being kept as a closely guarded secret.
Perhaps that's because it's not the president-elect's family history that would be revealed but his wife's family history that led to the decision to have such a confidentiality agreement. It's one thing to disclose your family history, another to disclose that of your wife, mother-in-law and all the other relatives on that side of the family. Even a president wants to be able to enjoy future family reunions in peace.
Or perhaps it's because there's some family secret, like those possessed by so many families, that the Obama's want to hold close.
It's hard to imagine however that the information in that genealogical report can't be replicated by other researchers since much of it appears to have come from Census records which are public and there must be other public sources of the information, too.
And now that it's public that the Obamas have put the details of her family's genealogical report off-limits, it's a certainty that other researchers will take up the challenge to see what they can find.
What Dahleen was able to find out includes this:
GEORGETOWN, S.C.--Tiny wooden cabins line the dirt road once known as Slave Street as it winds its way through Friendfield Plantation.
More than 200 slaves lived in the whitewashed shacks in the early 1800s, and some of their descendants remained here for more than a century after the Civil War. The last tenants abandoned the hovels about three decades ago, and even they would have struggled to imagine a distant daughter of the plantation one day calling the White House home.
But a historical line can be drawn from these Low Country cabins to Michelle Obama, charting an American family's improbable journey through slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement and a historic presidential election.
But a historical line can be drawn from these Low Country cabins to Michelle Obama, charting an American family's improbable journey through slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement and a historic presidential election.
Their documented passage begins with Jim Robinson, Obama's great-great-grandfather, who was born around 1850 and lived as a slave, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling rice plantation. Records show he remained on the estate after the war, working as a sharecropper and living in the old slave quarters with his wife, Louiser, and their children. He could neither read nor write, according to the 1880 census.
Robinson would be the last illiterate branch of Michelle Obama's family tree.
-----------------
Update:
Toni Carrier, founding director of Lowcountry Africana, sent the following response to my posting:
On behalf of Lowcountry Africana, I would like to respond to the statements made here concerning our role in researching Michelle Obama's family heritage. Ms. Glanton contacted us from Georgetown, where she was working on the Robinson family history. She had been given our contact information and asked if we had conducted research there. We confirmed that we performed a significant amount of research on behalf of the Obama campaign but would not discuss any of our findings.
Although we do occasionally conduct genealogical research for others, Lowcountry Africana only does so at a descendants' request. We do not, as a policy, publish or discuss the details of others' family history unless they wish to share the information with others and request that we do so. We are especially sensitive about releasing family history information regarding the descendents of enslaved communities as it may take time before all members of the family are prepared to discuss or come to terms with the details of their ancestor's lives. If and when descendants wish to share their family history or discuss it publicly, they will.
Did we sign a confidentiality agreement before conducting our research? We did--and to the best of our knowledge it was a version of the same one that every other person who worked with the Obama campaign signed. Did we find any secrets or terribly unusual circumstances that would cause any family to be embarrassed to have their history known? No we did not. That we can easily tell you.
We also wish to set the record straight about the details of Michele Obama's family history contained in Ms. Glanton's article - she found all of that information through her own research in public records. I believe her article makes that clear but feel that reinforcing that point is important.
No comments:
Post a Comment