Uppity-ism by Michelle Obama, Obama's baby mama, gives a speech to the in-crowed, the guaranteed socialist voters. Michelle really thinks that white people don't like black people when the truth is white people don't like Michelle or Barack because they lie, cheat, steal, bribe and allow corruption. Now that Michelle can go into any Museum she wants, she needs to remember her history, it's very sad that Michelle, the first lady, doesn't care about anything except she's black....
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.
A Paper Trail to the White House
The Family Tree of
Michelle Obama, the First Lady
In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl
Melvinia.” After his death, she was 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 some two
years before the Civil War, represents 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,
Mrs. 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
Mrs. Obama’s roots were a mystery.
Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors —
including 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 Mrs. Obama has called longstanding
family rumors about a white forebear.
While President 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. Mrs. 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,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for
generations.”
The outlines of Mrs. 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. Ms. Smolenyak,
who has traced the ancestry of many prominent figures, began studying the first
lady’s roots in earnest after conducting some preliminary research into Mrs.
Obama’s ancestry for an article published in The New York Times earlier this
year.
Of the dozens of relatives she identified, Ms. Smolenyak
said, it was the slave girl who seemed to call out most clearly.
“Out of all Michelle’s roots, it’s Melvinia who is screaming
to be found,” she said.
When her owner, David Patterson, died in 1852, Melvinia soon
found herself on a 200-acre farm with new masters, Mr. Patterson’s daughter and
son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. It was a strange and unfamiliar
world.
In South Carolina, she had lived on an estate with 21
slaves. In Georgia, she was one of only three slaves on property that is now
part of a neat subdivision in Rex, near Atlanta.
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 3 horses, 5 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.
“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 A. Gillmer, a law professor at
Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and
slaves. “But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex.”
In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including
Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. One was born four years after
emancipation, suggesting that the liaison that produced those children endured
after slavery. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at
their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their
master’s 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 County, near the Alabama border. Dolphus married one of the
Easleys’ daughters, Alice, who is Mrs. Obama’s great-great-grandmother.
A community “that had been ripped apart was somehow pulling
itself back together,” Ms. Smolenyak said of the group in Bartow County.
Still, Melvinia appears to have lived with the unresolved
legacy of her childhood in slavery until the very end. Her 1938 death
certificate, signed by a relative, says “don’t know” in the space for the names
of her parents, suggesting that Melvinia, then in her 90s, may never have known
herself.
Sometime before 1888, Dolphus and Alice Shields continued
the migration, heading to Birmingham, a boomtown with a rumbling railroad, an
iron and steel industry and factories that attracted former slaves and their
children from across the South.
Dolphus Shields was in his 30s and very light skinned — some
say he looked like a white man — a church-going carpenter who could read, write
and advance in an industrializing town. By 1900, he owned his own home, census
records show. By 1911, he had opened his own carpentry and tool sharpening
business.
A co-founder of First Ebenezer Baptist Church and Trinity
Baptist Church, which later became active in the civil rights movement, he
supervised Sunday schools at both churches, which still exist today, and at
Regular Missionary Baptist Church.
“He was the dean of the deacons in Birmingham,” said Helen
Heath, 88, who attended church with him. “He was a serious man. He was about
business.”
He carried his family into the working-class, moving into a
segregated neighborhood of striving black homeowners and renters. In his home,
there was no smoking, no cursing, no gum chewing, no lipstick or trousers for
ladies and absolutely no blues on the radio, which was reserved for hymns, remembered
Bobbie Holt, 73, who was raised by Mr. Shields and his fourth wife, Lucy. She
said the family went to church “every night of the week, it seemed like.”
He carried peppermints for neighborhood children, Mrs. Holt
said, and told funny stories about his escapades as a boy. But his family
struggled.
His first wife, Alice Easley Shields, moved around after
they split up, working as a seamstress and a maid, and two of their sons
stumbled.
Robert Lee Shields, Mrs. 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.
Willie Arthur Shields, an inventor who obtained patents for
improving dry cleaning operations, ended up working as a maintenance man, Mrs.
Holt said.
As for his ancestry, Dolphus Shields didn’t talk about it.
“We got to the place where we didn’t want anybody to know we
knew slaves; people didn’t want to talk about that,” said Mrs. Heath, who said
she assumed he had white relatives because his skin color and hair texture
“told you he had to be near white.”
At a time when blacks despaired at the intransigence and
violence of whites who barred them from voting, from most city jobs, from
whites-only restaurants and from owning property in white neighborhoods,
Dolphus Shields served as a rare link between the deeply divided communities.
His carpentry shop stood in the white section of town, and
he mixed easily and often with whites. “They would come to his shop and sit and
talk,” Mrs. Holt said.
Dolphus Shields firmly believed race relations would
improve. “It’s going to come together one day,” he often said, Mrs. Holt
recalled.
By the time he died in 1950 at age 91, change was on the
way. On June 9, 1950, the day that his obituary appeared on the front page of
The Birmingham World, the black newspaper also ran a banner headline that read,
“U.S. Court Bans Segregation in Diners and Higher Education.” The Supreme Court
had outlawed separate but equal accommodations on railway cars and in
universities in Texas and Oklahoma.
Up North, his grandson, a painter named Purnell Shields,
Mrs. 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.
Mrs. Holt, a retired nursing assistant, said he came to her
in a dream last month. She dug up his photograph, never guessing that she would
soon learn that Dolphus Shields was a great-great-grandfather of the first
lady.
“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Holt, gasping at the news. “I always
looked up to him, but I would never have imagined something like this. Praise
God, we’ve come a long way.”
If Michelle Obama gave this kind of speech before her radical husband became president they would have been run out of the country but, now the election is over and the Negro radical comes to the surface like old faithful.
She jets around the country like she was elected and has nothing to do except complain about White America, even with her hair straight.
Michelle Obama kept expelling her hatred for White America because she refuses to accept that most hard working people don't life shiftless, no good, under-educated, rioting, robbing fools that surround her.
Michelle Obama, the worthless first black American first lady, helped her husband destroy the job market and Negro's don't have job's but they have welfare, obamacare, section eight housing, free cell phones and even low cost bus rides.
Negro's are allowed to burn down 200 businesses in Baltimore but the cops just watch and it is surely the fault of the Black Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake because she wants all the Whites out of town, just like Michelle. The free black America that Michelle and Barack dream of is full of corruption, drugs, guns and ebola so maybe she's dead wrong?
Before Michelle and Barack squatted in the White House the black and white problem was almost resolved until the radicals got some white power in their blue blood. Now Michelle can talk like trailer trash, talk about slavery and hide her past just like Barack.
Now that Marilyn Mosby, Barack Obama, she-wolf Michelle Obama, Stephanie Rawlings Blake, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson have combined their conspiracy concerning Freddie Gray nobody wants to talk about the illegal knife, the burning of Baltimore, the injuries and crimes against the police and property. They truly think MLK would approve of them acting like crazy Negro's in the streets, destroying and hating, spreading drugs and crimes, always hunting for the free stuff, the lonely white lady walking with her purse.
Good job Michelle
REX, Ga. — Joan Tribble held tightly to her cane as she
ventured into the overgrown cemetery where her people were buried. There lay
the pioneers who once populated north Georgia’s rugged frontier, where striving
white men planted corn and cotton, fought for the Confederacy and owned slaves.
The settlers interred here were mostly forgotten over the
decades as their progeny scattered across the South, embracing unassuming
lives. But one line of her family took another path, heading north on a
tumultuous, winding journey that ultimately led to the White House.
The white men and women buried here are the forebears of
Mrs. Tribble, a retired bookkeeper who delights in her two grandchildren and her
Sunday church mornings. They are also ancestors of Michelle Obama, the first
lady.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
interactive The First
Family: A New Glimpse of Michelle Obama’s White AncestorsJUNE 22, 2012
video The First Family, RedefinedJUNE 16, 2012
slideshow Michelle Obama’s AncestorsJUNE 16, 2012
Dolphus Shields, seated, with relatives in Birmingham, Ala.,
was born into slavery on a Georgia farm. He was Michelle Obama's maternal
great-great-grandfather.‘American Tapestry,’ by Rachel L. SwarnsJUNE 14, 2012
The discovery of this unexpected family tie between the
nation’s most prominent black woman and a white, silver-haired grandmother from
the Atlanta suburbs underscores the entangled histories and racial
intermingling that continue to bind countless American families more than 140
years after the Civil War.
Photo
Sherry George, a member of the Shields family, has struggled
with the discovery that Michelle Obama is a descendant of a slave owned by the
Shieldses. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times
The link was established through more than two years of
research into Mrs. Obama’s roots, which included DNA tests of white and black
relatives. Like many African-Americans, Mrs. Obama was aware that she had white
ancestry, but knew little more.
Now, for the first time, the white forebears who have
remained hidden in the first lady’s family tree can be identified. And her
blood ties are not only to the dead. She has an entire constellation of white
distant cousins who live in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas and beyond,
who in turn are only now learning of their kinship to her.
Those relatives include professionals and blue-collar
workers, a retired construction worker, an accountant, a dietitian and an
insurance claims adjuster, among others, who never imagined they had black
relatives. Most had no idea that their ancestors owned slaves.
Many of them, like Mrs. Tribble, 69, are still grappling
with their wrenching connection to the White House. “You really don’t like to
face this kind of thing,” said Mrs. Tribble, whose ancestors owned the first
lady’s great-great-great-grandmother.
Some of Mrs. Tribble’s relatives have declined to discuss
the matter beyond the closed doors of their homes, fearful that they might be
vilified as racists or forced to publicly atone for their forebears.
Mrs. Tribble has decided to openly accept her history and
her new extended family.
“I can’t really change anything,” said Mrs. Tribble, who
would like to meet Mrs. Obama one day. “But I can be open-minded to people and
accept them and hope they’ll accept me.”
Complicated Histories
The bloodlines of Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Tribble extend back to
a 200-acre farm that was not far from here. One of their common ancestors was Henry
Wells Shields, Mrs. Tribble’s great-great-grandfather. He was a farmer and a
family man who grew cotton, Indian corn and sweet potatoes. He owned Mrs.
Obama’s maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, who was about
8 years old when she arrived on his farm sometime around 1852.
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The DNA tests and research indicate that one of his sons,
Charles Marion Shields, is the likely father of Melvinia’s son Dolphus, who was
born around 1860. Dolphus T. Shields was the first lady’s maternal
great-great-grandfather. His identity and that of his mother, Melvinia, were
first reported in an article in The New York Times in 2009, which also
indicated that he must have had a white father.
Melvinia was a teenager, perhaps around 15, when she gave
birth to her biracial son. Charles was about 20.
Such forbidden liaisons across the racial divide inevitably
bring to mind the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Mrs.
Obama’s ancestors, however, lived in a world far removed from the elegance of
Jefferson’s Monticello, his 5,000-acre mountain estate with 200 slaves. They
were much more typical of the ordinary people who became entangled in America’s
entrenched system of servitude.
No Easy Life
In Clayton County, Ga., where the Shields family lived, only
about a third of the heads of household owned human property, and masters
typically labored alongside their slaves. Charles was a man of modest means —
he would ultimately become a teacher — whose parents were only a generation or
so removed from illiteracy.
Melvinia was not a privileged house slave like Sally. She
was illiterate and no stranger to laboring in the fields. She had more biracial
children after the Civil War, giving some of the white Shieldses hope that her
relationship with Charles was consensual.
Photo
Dolphus T. Shields, the son of a slave, was Michelle Obama's
great-great-grandfather. Credit Courtesy of Jewell Barclay
“To me, it’s an obvious love story that was hard for the
South to accept back then,” said Aliene Shields, a descendant who lives in
South Carolina.
People who knew Melvinia said she never discussed what
happened between them, whether she was raped or treated with affection, whether
she was loved and loved in return. Somewhere along the way, she decided to keep
the truth about her son’s heritage to herself.
Ruth Wheeler Applin, who knew Melvinia and Dolphus,
suspected that Melvinia had been raped by her master. But Mrs. Applin, who
married Melvinia’s grandson and lived with her for several years in the 1930s,
never asked that sensitive question. Melvinia died in 1938.
“You know,” Mrs. Applin said in an interview in 2010, “she
might not have wanted nobody to know.” Mrs. Applin died this year at 92.
For many members of that first generation to emerge from
bondage, the experience of slavery was so shameful and painful that they rarely
spoke of it. This willful forgetting pervaded several branches of the first
lady’s family tree, passed along like an inheritance from one generation to the
next.
Mrs. Obama declined to comment on the findings about her
roots, as did her mother and brother. But over and over, the black members of
her extended family said their parents, grandparents and other relatives did
not discuss slavery or the origins of the family’s white ancestry.
Nor was the topic much discussed within Mrs. Obama’s
immediate family. She and her brother, Craig Robinson, watched the mini-series
“Roots,” about Alex Haley’s family’s experience in slavery. During summers, the
family would visit relatives who lived in a South Carolina town dotted with old
rice plantations. But they never discussed how those plantations might be
connected to their personal history.
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Nomenee Robinson, Mrs. Obama’s paternal uncle, said he found
himself stymied whenever he tried to delve into the past. His line of the
family also has white ancestry, relatives say.
“All of these elderly people in my family, they would say,
‘Boy, I don’t know anything about slavery time,’ ” he said. “And I kept
thinking, ‘You mean your mother or grandmother didn’t tell you anything about
it?’ What I think is that they blocked it out.”
Contemporary America emerged from that multiracial stew, a
nation peopled by the heirs of that agonizing time who struggled and strived
with precious little knowledge of their own origins. By 1890, census takers
counted 1.1 million Americans of mixed ancestry.
All four of Mrs. Obama’s grandparents had multiracial
forebears. There were Irish immigrants who nurtured their dreams in a new land
and free African-Americans who savored liberty long before the Civil War. Some
were classified as mulatto by the census, while others claimed Cherokee
ancestry.
There were even tantalizing hints of a link to a Jewish
family with ties to the Charleston, S.C., synagogue that became the birthplace
of the American Jewish Reform Movement in the 19th century.
Mrs. Obama’s ancestors ultimately moved north, with some
arriving in Illinois as early as the 1860s. Others settled in Maryland,
Michigan and Ohio.
Dolphus’s daughter, Pearl Lewis, moved to Cleveland. Pearl’s
granddaughter, Jewell Barclay, still remembers Dolphus, a stern, fair-skinned
man with narrow lips and an aquiline nose. There were whispers in the family
that he was half white.
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“Slave time, you know how the white men used to fool with
them black women, that’s what I heard,” Mrs. Barclay said.
Photo
McClellan Charles Shields had the same father as Dolphus T.
Shields, Michelle Obama's great-great-grandfather. Credit Richard Perry/The New
York Times
Mrs. Barclay said she would like to meet white members of
her family. Mrs. Tribble and Sherry George, a great-granddaughter of Charles
Marion Shields, said they would also like to meet their black extended family.
Others remain reluctant. “I don’t think there’s going to be
a Kumbaya moment here,” said one of Charles Shields’s great-grandchildren, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearful that the ancestral ties to slavery
might besmirch the family name.
DNA Testing
The discovery comes as an increasing number of Americans,
black and white, confront their own family histories, taking advantage of widespread
access to DNA testing and online genealogical records. Jennifer L. Hochschild,
a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard who has studied
the impact of DNA testing on racial identity, said this was uncharted
territory.
“This is a whole new social arena,” Professor Hochschild
said. “We don’t have an etiquette for this. We don’t have social norms.”
“More or less every white person knows that slave owners
raped slaves,” she continued. “But my great-grandfather? People don’t know what
they feel. They don’t know what they’re supposed to feel. I think it’s really
hard.”
Mrs. George, a hospital respiratory therapy manager,
struggled to describe her reaction to the revelations. Her grandfather
McClellan Charles Shields and Dolphus Shields were half brothers. They both
lived in Birmingham, where Mrs. George grew up.
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“I’m appalled at slavery,” said Mrs. George, 61. “I don’t
know how that could have even gone on in a Christian nation. I know that times
were different then. But the idea that one of our ancestors raped a slave. ...
”
She trailed off for a moment, considering the awful
possibility.
“I would like to know the answer, but I would not like to
know that my great-grandfather was a rapist,” she said. “I would like to know
in my brain that they were nice to her and her children. It would be easier to
live with that.”
Mrs. Tribble, who began researching her roots before Mrs.
Obama became the first lady, said she was shocked to learn that her ancestors
owned slaves.
“My family, well, they were just your most basic people who
never had a lot,” Mrs. Tribble said. “I never imagined that they owned slaves.”
Her mother, Lottie Bell Shields, was an orphan who picked
cotton as a girl and was passed from relative to relative in a family that
could ill afford an extra mouth to feed. She never got past the seventh grade.
Yet even before she took the DNA test, Mrs. Tribble had a
strong feeling that her family and the first lady’s family were related. She
still remembers the moment when she laid eyes on an old black-and-white
photograph of Dolphus Shields. She was sitting at her kitchen table in her house
in the Atlanta suburbs when she saw him staring out of the pages of The New
York Times: this stern, bespectacled African-American man who happened to share
her mother’s last name.
Mrs. Tribble never had any doubts about her family’s ethnic
background. Yet when she stared at the photograph that day, she said she felt
something entirely unexpected: a strong stirring of recognition.
“I just thought, ‘Well, he looks like somebody who could be
in my family,’ ” she said.
