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Michelle Obama's great-great-great-grandmom was a slave girl |
In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand
and painstakingly divided up his possessions, including a six-year-old slave girl
who was then valued at 475 dollars. That girl eventually turned out to be US First
Lady Michelle Obama's great-great-great-grandmom. In his will, the slave girl
was simply described 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. According to The Times, 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. Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Michelle
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. |
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