The Black History of the White House (48 page)

CHAPTER 9

I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners.
—Barack Obama, March 18, 2008, Philadelphia

Prelude: Michelle Obama's White House Story

The legislation that brought California into the nation as a free state and New Mexico and Utah as slave territories, also created the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the previous decade, abolitionist influence had grown and the movement's activism was successfully weakening enforcement of the 1793 Fugitive Slave law. Local officials were refusing to arrest or return individuals who were accused of being runaways. The “personal liberty laws” that existed in fourteen states found a variety of ways to confound Southern efforts to capture those who had escaped. In particular, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Wisconsin passed laws that required a jury trial for anyone accused of being an escapee, forbade the use of local jails to hold those accused, put restrictions on bounty hunters, and allowed local officials to go unpunished for not helping slave catchers. States' rights advocate John Calhoun called the laws “one of the most fatal blows ever received by the South or the Union.”
¹
In
1842, the Supreme Court had ruled in
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
that states could refuse to assist in the hunting of escapees.

The 1850 Act was an attempt by the South to strengthen the recapture laws and undermine the gathering storm of abolition. The Act created a $1,000 fine to be levied on federal marshals who did not arrest accused individuals, allowed for arrests without warrants, and eliminated jury trials related to the charge. Individual citizens could also be fined $1,000 and punished with six months in jail for aiding or abetting someone's escape. In their effort to further nationalize the reach of slavery, Southern slaveholders intensified polarization over the issue, which pushed the country that much closer to the edge of civil war.

In that same year, six-year-old Melvinia, an enslaved child of unrecorded parentage, was sent from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Georgia to continue her life in bondage after David Patterson, her white enslaver, died.
²
Property records indicated that she was valued at $475.00, approximately $12,500.00 in 2010 dollars. Patterson had written in his will that Melvinia would be bequeathed to his wife, Ruth, who would inherit “the use and service of the negro [
sic
] girl, her issue and increase, if any.” Doubtless, he believed he was being benevolent when he also wrote in the will that his slave families “be kept together as far as possible,” making it clear to his heirs that they were under no obligation to do so. However, it appears that Ruth died before David did, and therefore Melvinia was passed along to Patterson's daughter and son-in-law in Georgia. Christianne and Henry Shields became her new enslavers on a 200-acre farm where Melvinia would eventually toil as a farm laborer, washerwoman, and maid. According to research by the
New York Times
, the farm grew “wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, and cotton” in an area near Atlanta. On this land, she would continue the
lineage that would eventually produce the great-great-great-granddaughter who became the nation's first African American First Lady.

While still a child in her teens, Melvinia was impregnated by a white man. At the time of this writing, nothing further is known regarding circumstances under which the relations took place. In either 1859 or 1861, Melvinia gave birth to a boy and named him Dolphus. He was the first of her three children who would be listed as mulatto, all of whom would be given the last name Shields rather than McGruder, the surname she later adopted. A fourth child was listed as black. Dolphus's father would never be listed in any of the records of his life, nor on his death certificate.

Whether Melvinia was raped by the white man or not, her impregnation took place in a context and era in which black women had little capacity to repel sexual attacks by white men. The slave era was perpetuated by white Americans' violent domination of every aspect of the black women, men, and children that they enslaved. In the hierarchy of ownership and power, black women's bodies were completely at the mercy of whites and, for that matter, of black men. Forced into the dual role of worker and breeder, black women routinely experienced forced sex, as it profited white enslavers to breed more slaves. In
Black Reconstruction
, W. E. B. Du Bois quotes from a letter:

A Southerner wrote to Olmsted: “In the states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, as much attention is paid to the breeding and growth of Negroes as to that of horses and mules. Further south, we raise them both for use and for market. Planters command their girls and women (married or unmarried) to have children; and
I have known a great many Negro girls to be sold off because they did not have children.”
³

White men frequently had sex with the black women they enslaved. The pervasiveness of this practice was such that more than half of those in the contemporary United States who claim African American heritage have documentable white ancestors. Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and many others were of mixed-race heritage. According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, “fully 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry.”
⁴
At the time of this writing Melvinia is Michelle Obama's most distant ancestor about whom anything is known. Further research may uncover more mixture in her heritage, as would be the case for most blacks whose ancestry in North America dates back to the beginnings of the slave era in the 1600s.

Struggling to raise her children, Melvinia slaved as a farm laborer and was perhaps ordered to do other jobs as well. According to her death certificate, which listed her profession as “domestic,” she lived into her early nineties and died on June 4, 1938. While there is ongoing research on her, little is known about her life. It appears that after slavery ended she worked extremely hard to make ends meet. Like most people enslaved at the time, she was illiterate, but she somehow was able to have her son Dolphus educated. Not only could he read and write, but by his late twenties, according to 1888 census records, he owned his own home in Birmingham, Alabama, and had apparently become a successful carpenter. Some years later, he would open his own carpentry and tool-sharpening business, by which time he was married to a woman named Lucy, the last of his wives. Deeply religious, he helped to found two churches.

Dolphus Shields was married four times. His first marriage
was with Alice Easley sometime in the early 1880s. Alice was the daughter of Bolus and Mariah Easley, who, along with Melvinia, were also at one time enslaved to David Patterson. The Easleys eventually ended up in Georgia before moving to Birmingham and reuniting with Melvinia. It is possible that, in fact, a community of former slaves from South Carolina was being built based on their common history. The marriage between Dolphus and Alice appeared to have lasted a number of years but had come to an end by 1900 at the latest. By that time Dolphus is listed as having remarried. The
New York Times
reports that after the divorce, Easley moved around and “worked as a seamstress, a washerwoman and a maid.” She died in 1915, most likely while living with her daughter, Pearl. Dolphus lived to be ninety-one and died of pneumonia on June 3, 1950. Together, Dolphus and Easley produced at least four children, two girls and two boys, one of whom was Robert, born in 1885 or 1886.

On June 27, 1906, Robert Shields married Annie Estelle Laws (or Lawson), and they had two sons Robert (b. 1909) and Purnell (b. 1910). By 1920, Annie and Robert were no longer together. Annie lived in Birmingham for a while with Robert Jr. and Purnell, and later relocated to Chicago, where she was listed as a seamstress. Purnell worked at a syrup factory and eventually married a woman named Rebecca, whose last name was either Jumper or Coleman. She worked as a nurse, at one point, at Chicago's Grant Hospital. Purnell and Rebecca Shields had eight children. In 1937, their daughter Marian Lois was born.

Purnell Shields, Michelle Obama's maternal grandfather, was a carpenter who attempted to join Chicago's carpenters' union but was denied admission because he was African American, even though the union, unlike some national and Chicago-based skilled unions in the pre–civil rights era, did not have a
formal policy barring black carpenters.
⁵
This meant that Purnell and other qualified black carpenters were generally unable to get the highest-paying construction jobs in the city. Even when they were hired, African American carpenters experienced racism. Many complained that they were “often shunned on the job by their white co-workers and given the most disagreeable work by the foreman.”
⁶
As late as 1980, blacks accounted for only 6.9 percent of working carpenters in the city, 1,705 in all.
⁷
Purnell's experience was passed down to his children and grandchildren as a story to inspire them to overcome and fight rather than succumb to despair because of racism. It was a lesson that black parents all over the city taught their children.

Chicago was a cauldron of black politics with a wide range of tendencies. It became the headquarters for the Nation of Islam. Founded in Detroit in 1930, the black nationalist religious organization that advocated racial separatism and black self-help would later move to Chicago under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad. From that time until Muhammad's death in 1975, Chicago served as the main office and home of the Nation of Islam, although its most famous disciple and subsequent critic, Malcolm X, emerged out of the Harlem branch of the group. In 1975, there was a split in the organization when Muhammad's son, Warith Deen Muhammad, who had taken over the group after his father died, changed the ideological nature of the group by opening the membership to whites and others, and shifting to a more mainstream Muslim posture. He also changed the name of the organization to the World Community of Al-Islam in the West, a name later replaced by yet another, the American Society of Muslims. These changes were rejected by many of the members, and a significant number of them quit. Three years later, Louis Farrakhan, a key figure under Elijah Muhammad's reign, reconstituted a parallel organization under the old name,
Nation of Islam, bringing along other members who had left or were dissatisfied with the new direction of the American Society of Muslims. Farrakhan also established headquarters in Chicago and positioned the NOI to remain an important element in local and national black politics. Its high-water mark was the Million Man March event in Washington, D.C., in 1995.
⁸
Since then, in part due to Farrakhan's failing health and its inability to capitalize on the spike in popularity it achieved among some black Americans as a result of the march, the organization's influence in black politics has receded considerably.

The city was also the home of one of the most active chapters of the Black Panther Party. It would become renowned after a deadly police raid on December 4, 1969, in which Panther leader Fred Hampton and party member Mark Clark were killed and several others seriously wounded in a joint operation by the Chicago police, Illinois state law enforcement, and the FBI. Hampton was shot while sleeping in his bed, drugged by barbiturates slipped into his food earlier in the evening by a police informant. The Chicago chapter of the Panthers had been one of the key targets of the FBI's COINTELPRO war under J. Edgar Hoover against black activists and leaders. In spite of the effort to destroy the Chicago branch, one of its members, Bobby Rush, would later be elected in 1992 to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2000, Barack Obama challenged Rush in the Democratic primary losing badly by a margin of two to one—which turned out to be fortunate for him, as it is highly unlikely that he would have been able to mount a winning campaign for the presidency from a seat in the relatively low-profile U.S. House of Representatives.

Somewhere between the militants and the mainstream was Operation Breadbasket, the organization launched by Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference in
1962. Its Chicago office would eventually be run by Reverend Jesse Jackson, who later left the organization and in 1971 started Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). PUSH would lead numerous boycotts and protests against corporations, pressuring them to hire blacks and buy advertisements in black newspapers. It also became active around the issue of education. After his presidential runs in the 1980s, Jackson would merge Operation PUSH with his National Rainbow Coalition, the organization he started to bring together progressive activists from around the country. At the time of this writing, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition remains based in Chicago.