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S Landreth

Michelle Obama Descended From Young Slave Girl and White Owner


A genealogist working with the New York Times has discovered a new page in the family history of First Lady Michelle Obama; her great-great-great grandmother, a teenage slave girl named Melvinia as young as 15 was impregnated by a white slave owner.

Genealogist Megan Smolenyak reconstructed this long-lost piece of the First Lady's family tree by using probate records, old photos and legal documents, and by interviewing senior citizens who remember the family of Melvinia's biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields (the Shields owned his young mother). Smoleynek said of the discovery: "Out of all of Michelle's roots, it is Melvinia who is screaming to be found."

Melvinia bore four children, three of whom were listed as 'mulatto.' It is doubtful that Melvinia's family tree will yield further results; on her death certificate the names of her parents are absent, listed by a relative as "don't know."

Melvinia's oldest son, the First Lady's great-great grandfather Dolphus, was said by those who remembered him to have been a light skinned, literate, church-going man. In an extraordinary linking of the past and future, Dolphus was heavily involved in the founding of two churches that figured in the history of the U.S. civil rights movement; he was co-founder of Trinity Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. and ran the Sunday school program at First Ebenezer Baptist Church of Birmingham.

"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 researches the history of slaves and their owners. But Dolphus' story gains a special resonance with that of his direct descendant: the same country that looked upon Melvinia's slavery as legal now looks up to her great-great-great granddaughter as its First Lady.

Bobbie Holt, a 73-year-old woman raised by Dolphus and his wife who was interviewed for the article, said that despite the pain in Dolphus' own family history, he was always hopeful there would one day be equality. She quoted him saying, "It's going to come together one day."


Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlene-h-phillips/michelle-obama-descended_b_313000.html

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sabang

^ I wish some genealogist would do my family tree for free.
All sorts of 'family skeletons', no doubt.

Michelle is receiving some gushing praise across the Pond for her artistic taste -

Still lifes and landscapes are out. Folk art, conceptual art, Native American art and African American art are in. Drawn mainly from the vaults of three Washington museums, the collection includes four scenes by William H. Johnson, a black painter who trained in Scandinavia in the 1930s, and a pottery bottle by Jeri Redcorn, descended from the Caddo Indians, who said she screamed with joy when she learnt that her work had found its way on to a shelf in the Oval Office.

There is also a dramatic rebuke to white racism in Black Like Me #2, by Glenn Ligon — a tall rectangular canvas covered in the words “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence”. The sentence comes from a book by a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who passed himself off as a black man and kept a diary as he travelled through the segregated South in 1959.

There are few works by women, none by Latinos and none by gay artists in the new collection, but it has been well received by the mainly liberal arbiters of the American art world, who pronounced it sophisticated, challenging and “great art to live with”. Harry Cooper, a modern art specialist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, called it mainstream but powerful. “It has wall power,” he said.

For traditionalists there are two Degas sculptures and twelve bucolic scenes of Native American life by the 19th-century wanderer George Catlin. But it is an indication of the avant garde tone of most of the First Lady’s choices that her one Mark Rothko — representing one of the great conceptual artists of the 20th century — looks conventional in its new setting.

Michelle Obama brings change in artistic taste to the White House - Times Online

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