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Michelle Obama's great-great-great grandfather was a white |
US First Lady Michelle Obama's great-great-great
grandfather was white. According to The Sun, Obama's great-great-great grandmother
Melvinia Shields, a slave, had a son in 1859 and the father is believed to be
the white son-in-law of her owner. Historians said Melvinia, who was 15 at the
time of the birth, could have been raped on the plantation where she worked in
South Carolina. Her son was Dolphus Shields, Michelle's great-great grandfather,
stood out at the time because of his light skin. Mrs Obama, whose husband Barack
had a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, refused to comment. According
to The Times, clues to the most enduring mystery of Obama family history emerged
in an investigation conducted recently. The breakthrough in piecing together a
journey across five generations from the slave-holding South to the White House
came with the discovery of a will written in 1850 by David Patterson, a South
Carolina estate-owner. The document listed the "negro girl Melvinia" in an inventory
of his property, along with nine other slaves and a miscellany of assets including
two tablecloths, three pairs of curtains and a coffee mill. Then just six years
old, Melvinia passed to Patterson's wife, who according to the will was to inherit
"the use and service of the said negro girl, her issue and increase, if any".
The identity of Melvinia Shields and new information about her descendants provides
the first concrete evidence for President Obama's ringing declaration in his one
major speech on race during last year's campaign that he was "married to a black
American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners". Rather
than holding on to the young slave, who died in 1938 without knowing who her parents
were, Patterson sent her to live with relatives in Georgia. It was there, according
to census records studied by The New York Times, that she gave birth to four children,
at least one of them fathered by a white man who may have been the Pattersons'
son-in-law, one of his sons, or a visitor to their farm. Dolfus Shields seized
on the opportunities offered by emancipation and moved to Birmingham, Alabama,
where he is still remembered by parishioners as the founder of the First Ebenezer
Baptist Church, and for his light skin. Dolfus Shields is buried in a neglected
black cemetery in Birmingham but in life counted whites among his friends and
customers at a carpentry workshop in the white section of the city. His grandson,
Purnell Shields, moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration between the wars.
He married a nurse, Rebecca Jumper. Their daughter, Marian Shields Robinson, is
Michelle Obama's mother and now lives with the First Family in the White House. |
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