Friday, October 9, 2009

Black Studies is American Studies

I know I'm preaching to the choir here when I say: Black Studies is American Studies. That's an idea I was reminded of earlier this week when I read the coverage on the findings of a genealogical study concerning the First Lady. Turns out that a slave named Melvinia Shields and an unknown white man are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama.

From NYTIMES's article In First Lady's Roots, A Complex Path From Slavery
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.

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.

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