Story Behind Michelle Obama’s White Roots
Story Behind Michelle Obama’s White Roots, The first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born to a slave and her white owner, a new book says. In “American Tapestry,” New York Times reporter Rachel L. Swarns explores the family history of Michelle Obama and discovers that the first lady’s roots are entwined with those of white slave-owners in 19th-century Georgia. The revelation has sparked a discussion about people and power and shows that while some want to celebrate the distant connections between blacks and whites, plenty more are still uncomfortable and angry about racial issues in America.
“My family, well, they were just your most basic people who never had a lot. I never imagined they owned slaves,” Joan Tribble, 69, told Swarns. Her great-great grandfather, Henry Wells Shield, owned a 200-acre farm near Rex, Georgia. He also owned Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, who came to his farm as an 8-year-old slave — torn from her parents, valued at $475 after her owner died — in 1852.
Swarns’ book, an excerpt of which ran recently in The New York Times, is a work of history, not a biography or an account of life in the White House. “I started with Mrs. Obama’s four grandparents and followed their family lines as far back as I could,” she writes on her website. “At least one of the First Lady’s white ancestors is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War; other mixed-race ancestors appear in documents that date back to the mid-1800s. I traced their lives in the South during the 19th century and their migration to Chicago in the early 20th century.”
According to Swarns’ research, Melvinia was a young teenager when she gave birth to her son Dolphus T. Shields around 1860. DNA testing shows that Henry Wells Shields’ son Charles Marion Shields, then 20, was most probably Dolphus’ father.
A new book traces Michelle Obama’s heritage.Photos of Dolphus Shields published in the New York Times show a light-skinned man with Caucasian features. He looks remarkably similar to a man in another photo — McClellan Charles Shields, another one of Charles Sheilds’ sons. When Tribble saw Dolphus Shields’ picture for the first time, “I just thought, ‘Well, he [Dolphus] looks like somebody who could be in my family,’ Tribble told Swarns.