Michelle Obama's family tree has roots in a Carolina slave plantation
Dahleen Glanton and Stacy St. ClairTribune Reporters
GEORGETOWN, S.C.—Tiny wooden cabins line the dirt road once known as Slave Street as it winds its way through Friendfield Plantation.
More than 200 slaves lived in the whitewashed shacks in the early 1800s, and some of their descendants remained here for more than a century after the Civil War. The last tenants abandoned the hovels about three decades ago, and even they would have struggled to imagine a distant daughter of the plantation one day calling the White House home.
But a historical line can be drawn from these Low Country cabins to Michelle Obama, charting an American family's improbable journey through slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement and a historic presidential election.
Their documented passage begins with Jim Robinson, Obama's great-great-grandfather, who was born around 1850 and lived as a slave, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling rice plantation. Records show he remained on the estate after the war, working as a sharecropper and living in the old slave quarters with his wife, Louiser, and their children. He could neither read nor write, according to the 1880 census.
More than 200 slaves lived in the whitewashed shacks in the early 1800s, and some of their descendants remained here for more than a century after the Civil War. The last tenants abandoned the hovels about three decades ago, and even they would have struggled to imagine a distant daughter of the plantation one day calling the White House home.
But a historical line can be drawn from these Low Country cabins to Michelle Obama, charting an American family's improbable journey through slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement and a historic presidential election.
Their documented passage begins with Jim Robinson, Obama's great-great-grandfather, who was born around 1850 and lived as a slave, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling rice plantation. Records show he remained on the estate after the war, working as a sharecropper and living in the old slave quarters with his wife, Louiser, and their children. He could neither read nor write, according to the 1880 census.
Robinson would be the last illiterate branch of Michelle Obama's family tree.
Census records show each generation of Robinsons became more educated than the last, with Michelle Obama eventually earning degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Her older brother, Craig, also received an Ivy League education.
Barack Obama's campaign hired genealogists to research the family's roots at the onset of his presidential bid, but aides have largely kept the findings secret. Genealogists at Lowcountry Africana, a research center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, scoured documents to put together a 120-page report, according to project director Toni Carrier. She said the center signed a confidentiality agreement and is not allowed to disclose the findings publicly.
However, in his now-famous speech on race during the primary, Barack Obama stated he was "married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners."
Obama aides declined to discuss the report or allow Michelle Obama to be interviewed about her ancestry. She has said she knew little about her family tree before the campaign, but census reports, property records and other historical documents show that her paternal ancestors bore witness to one of the most shameful chapters in American history.
When Michelle Obama moves into the White House—a mansion built partially by slaves—she will embark upon a life her great-great-grandfather never could have envisioned for her. At antebellum estates such as Friendfield Planation, past sins are being revisited amid the celebration.
Frances Cheston Train, whose family bought the property in the 1930s and transformed it into a hunting preserve for wealthy Northerners, fights back tears as she reflects on how far the country has come since Robinson labored in the mosquito-infested rice fields along the Sampit River. Though her family never owned slaves, the 82-year-old heiress to the Drexel family banking fortune recalls the segregation laws that divided the Georgetown community.
"It's beyond healing," Train said of the Obamas' success. "What it has given everyone is a sense of pride that this amazing, intelligent and attractive couple could be connected to Friendfield."
Little is known about Robinson's life at the plantation, beyond that he worked in the riverfront rice fields after the Civil War. Local historians don't know how or when he came to Friendfield, but census records indicate that both his parents were born in South Carolina.
A map from the early 1870s, when Robinson was living on the plantation, shows three parallel rows of slave cabins, each with 10 to 13 buildings along Slave Street. But by 1911, only 14 were still standing.
Five single cabins remain today. With their massive fireplaces and wood plank walls, each tells a story about slave life on the plantation.
The small shacks, only 19 feet deep, housed several families at once, said Ed Carter, who now oversees the property. Large, stone fireplaces were used for cooking and heating. Attic space in the rafters beneath the gable roof offered a place for extra people to sleep.
The plantation's former owner, Francis Withers, built a "meeting house" for the slaves on the estate before 1841, and the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church assigned a preacher there. A fire destroyed the church in 1940, but a massive live oak still stands near the old site.
By the time Withers died in 1847, the family had expanded Friendfield to include six plantations and more than 500 slaves. At the height of the rice trade, Friendfield was one of the most lucrative plantations in the area, producing what was called Carolina Gold on more than 500 acres of rice fields, Carter said.
In his will, Withers, who was educated at Harvard University, provided for the care of his slaves, including the upkeep of the church and a salary for the preacher. He also requested that his slaves be treated with "great kindness and be fed and clothed." He bequeathed $50 a year to Charlotte Nelson, described as a "mulatto woman" who had been freed by his brother, for the rest of her life.
He left $10,000 to buy more slaves to work the plantation and provided financial incentives for his surviving relatives to retain his "Friendfield gang of slaves" as a group and not break up slave families.
The plantation's prosperity faded after the Civil War, and the family began selling off the property in 1879, according to land records. Robinson, like many former slaves, continued to live on the farm.
Census records show each generation of Robinsons became more educated than the last, with Michelle Obama eventually earning degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Her older brother, Craig, also received an Ivy League education.
Barack Obama's campaign hired genealogists to research the family's roots at the onset of his presidential bid, but aides have largely kept the findings secret. Genealogists at Lowcountry Africana, a research center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, scoured documents to put together a 120-page report, according to project director Toni Carrier. She said the center signed a confidentiality agreement and is not allowed to disclose the findings publicly.
However, in his now-famous speech on race during the primary, Barack Obama stated he was "married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners."
Obama aides declined to discuss the report or allow Michelle Obama to be interviewed about her ancestry. She has said she knew little about her family tree before the campaign, but census reports, property records and other historical documents show that her paternal ancestors bore witness to one of the most shameful chapters in American history.
When Michelle Obama moves into the White House—a mansion built partially by slaves—she will embark upon a life her great-great-grandfather never could have envisioned for her. At antebellum estates such as Friendfield Planation, past sins are being revisited amid the celebration.
Frances Cheston Train, whose family bought the property in the 1930s and transformed it into a hunting preserve for wealthy Northerners, fights back tears as she reflects on how far the country has come since Robinson labored in the mosquito-infested rice fields along the Sampit River. Though her family never owned slaves, the 82-year-old heiress to the Drexel family banking fortune recalls the segregation laws that divided the Georgetown community.
"It's beyond healing," Train said of the Obamas' success. "What it has given everyone is a sense of pride that this amazing, intelligent and attractive couple could be connected to Friendfield."
Little is known about Robinson's life at the plantation, beyond that he worked in the riverfront rice fields after the Civil War. Local historians don't know how or when he came to Friendfield, but census records indicate that both his parents were born in South Carolina.
A map from the early 1870s, when Robinson was living on the plantation, shows three parallel rows of slave cabins, each with 10 to 13 buildings along Slave Street. But by 1911, only 14 were still standing.
Five single cabins remain today. With their massive fireplaces and wood plank walls, each tells a story about slave life on the plantation.
The small shacks, only 19 feet deep, housed several families at once, said Ed Carter, who now oversees the property. Large, stone fireplaces were used for cooking and heating. Attic space in the rafters beneath the gable roof offered a place for extra people to sleep.
The plantation's former owner, Francis Withers, built a "meeting house" for the slaves on the estate before 1841, and the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church assigned a preacher there. A fire destroyed the church in 1940, but a massive live oak still stands near the old site.
By the time Withers died in 1847, the family had expanded Friendfield to include six plantations and more than 500 slaves. At the height of the rice trade, Friendfield was one of the most lucrative plantations in the area, producing what was called Carolina Gold on more than 500 acres of rice fields, Carter said.
In his will, Withers, who was educated at Harvard University, provided for the care of his slaves, including the upkeep of the church and a salary for the preacher. He also requested that his slaves be treated with "great kindness and be fed and clothed." He bequeathed $50 a year to Charlotte Nelson, described as a "mulatto woman" who had been freed by his brother, for the rest of her life.
He left $10,000 to buy more slaves to work the plantation and provided financial incentives for his surviving relatives to retain his "Friendfield gang of slaves" as a group and not break up slave families.
The plantation's prosperity faded after the Civil War, and the family began selling off the property in 1879, according to land records. Robinson, like many former slaves, continued to live on the farm.
It's unclear when Robinson died, but local historians believe he is buried in an unmarked grave in a slave cemetery that overlooks the old rice fields on the edges of Whites Creek.
Among Robinson's surviving children was Fraser Robinson Sr., Michelle Obama's great-grandfather. Born in 1884, Fraser Sr. went to work as a houseboy for a local family before his 16th birthday. Census records show he was illiterate as a teen but had learned to read and write by the time he had his own children.
As an adult, Fraser Sr. worked as a lumber mill laborer, shoe repairman and newspaper salesman. He registered for the draft during World War I but was turned down because he had lost his left arm, military records show.
Fraser Sr. married a local woman named Rose Ella Cohen and had at least six children. Described by a family friend as an intelligent man who wanted his children to be well-read, Fraser Sr. always brought home his extra copies of the Palmetto Leader and Grit, a black newspaper that was popular in rural communities across the country.
"He used to make his children read those newspapers," said Margretta Dunmore Knox, who still lives in Georgetown and attended the same church as the Robinsons. "Maybe that's how they became so smart."
His eldest son, Fraser Jr., was born in 1912 and graduated from high school. Census records from 1930 show that 18-year-old Fraser Jr. was living at home and working at a sawmill after earning his degree.
At the time, Georgetown, a costal town about an hour's drive north of Charleston and the state's third-oldest city, was split along racial lines. The basic human rights that blacks had known after the Reconstruction era disappeared as the Deep South sank into the Depression and segregationist ways.
Train recalls playing with black children at Friendfield but not being allowed to go with them to the movies or the beach. She knew her playmates lived in cabins once inhabited by slaves, but no one ever broached the topic.
"It was a very painful memory," said Train, who still winters at the hunting preserve and has written a memoir about the estate titled "A Carolina Plantation Remembered: In Those Days.""It was not something we ever talked about."
As Georgetown's economy crumbled, Fraser Jr. headed north to Chicago in search of employment. Once there, he met and married LaVaughn Johnson.
Their son Fraser Robinson III—Michelle Obama's father—was born in 1935.
Though they never attended college, Fraser III and his wife, Marian, made education a top priority for their two children. Both would later attend Princeton and earn postgraduate degrees from prestigious universities.
Fraser Jr. and LaVaughn Robinson lived on the South Side for part of Michelle's childhood, before retiring and moving down South. After returning to Georgetown, the couple joined the Bethel AME Church, which was founded by freed slaves in 1865 and is the oldest black church in the city. The couple sang in the choir and built a large circle of friends, Knox said.
Michelle Obama returned to the same church in January while campaigning for her husband in the South Carolina primary.
Addressing a packed audience that included at least 30 descendants of Jim Robinson, Obama talked about the need for change in the confident voice of a distant daughter of slavery.
"Things get better when regular folks take action to make change happen from the bottom up," she said. "Every major historical moment in our time, it has been made by folks who said, 'Enough,' and they banded together to move this country forward—and now is one of those times."
dglanton@tribune.com
sstclair@tribune.com
Among Robinson's surviving children was Fraser Robinson Sr., Michelle Obama's great-grandfather. Born in 1884, Fraser Sr. went to work as a houseboy for a local family before his 16th birthday. Census records show he was illiterate as a teen but had learned to read and write by the time he had his own children.
As an adult, Fraser Sr. worked as a lumber mill laborer, shoe repairman and newspaper salesman. He registered for the draft during World War I but was turned down because he had lost his left arm, military records show.
Fraser Sr. married a local woman named Rose Ella Cohen and had at least six children. Described by a family friend as an intelligent man who wanted his children to be well-read, Fraser Sr. always brought home his extra copies of the Palmetto Leader and Grit, a black newspaper that was popular in rural communities across the country.
"He used to make his children read those newspapers," said Margretta Dunmore Knox, who still lives in Georgetown and attended the same church as the Robinsons. "Maybe that's how they became so smart."
His eldest son, Fraser Jr., was born in 1912 and graduated from high school. Census records from 1930 show that 18-year-old Fraser Jr. was living at home and working at a sawmill after earning his degree.
At the time, Georgetown, a costal town about an hour's drive north of Charleston and the state's third-oldest city, was split along racial lines. The basic human rights that blacks had known after the Reconstruction era disappeared as the Deep South sank into the Depression and segregationist ways.
Train recalls playing with black children at Friendfield but not being allowed to go with them to the movies or the beach. She knew her playmates lived in cabins once inhabited by slaves, but no one ever broached the topic.
"It was a very painful memory," said Train, who still winters at the hunting preserve and has written a memoir about the estate titled "A Carolina Plantation Remembered: In Those Days.""It was not something we ever talked about."
As Georgetown's economy crumbled, Fraser Jr. headed north to Chicago in search of employment. Once there, he met and married LaVaughn Johnson.
Their son Fraser Robinson III—Michelle Obama's father—was born in 1935.
Though they never attended college, Fraser III and his wife, Marian, made education a top priority for their two children. Both would later attend Princeton and earn postgraduate degrees from prestigious universities.
Fraser Jr. and LaVaughn Robinson lived on the South Side for part of Michelle's childhood, before retiring and moving down South. After returning to Georgetown, the couple joined the Bethel AME Church, which was founded by freed slaves in 1865 and is the oldest black church in the city. The couple sang in the choir and built a large circle of friends, Knox said.
Michelle Obama returned to the same church in January while campaigning for her husband in the South Carolina primary.
Addressing a packed audience that included at least 30 descendants of Jim Robinson, Obama talked about the need for change in the confident voice of a distant daughter of slavery.
"Things get better when regular folks take action to make change happen from the bottom up," she said. "Every major historical moment in our time, it has been made by folks who said, 'Enough,' and they banded together to move this country forward—and now is one of those times."
dglanton@tribune.com
sstclair@tribune.com
Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune
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The Gullah and Geechee culture on the Sea Islands of Georgia has retained ethnic traditions from West Africa since the mid-1700s. Although the islands along the southeastern U.S. coast harbor the same collective of West Africans, the name Gullah has come to be the accepted name of the islanders in South Carolina, while Geechee refers to the islanders of Georgia. Modern-day researchers designate the region stretching from Sandy Island, South Carolina, to Amelia Island, Florida, as the Gullah Coast—the locale of the culture that built some of the richest plantations in the South.
Many traditions of the Gullah and Geechee culture were passed from one generation to the next through language, agriculture, and spirituality. The culture has been linked to specific West African ethnic groups who were enslaved on island plantations to grow rice, indigo, and cotton starting in 1750, when antislavery laws ended in the Georgia colony.
Enslavement
A Board of Trustees established Georgia in 1732 with the primary purposes of settling impoverished British citizens and creating a mercantile system that would supply England with needed agricultural products. The colony enacted a 1735 antislavery law, but the prohibition was lifted in 1750. West Africans, the argument went, were far more able to cope with the climatic conditions found in the South. And, as the growing wealth of South Carolina's rice economy demonstrated, slaves were far more profitable than any other form of labor available to the colonists.
Rice plantations fostered Georgia's successful economic competition with other slave-based rice economies along the eastern seaboard. Coastal plantations invested primarily in rice, and plantation owners sought out Africans from the Windward Coast of West Africa (Senegambia [later Senegal and the Gambia], Sierra Leone, and Liberia), where rice, indigo, and cotton were indigenous to the region. Over the ensuing centuries, the isolation of the rice-growing ethnic groups, who re-created their native cultures and traditions on the coastal Sea Islands, led to the formation of an identity recognized as Geechee/Gullah.
There is no single West African contribution to Geechee/Gullah culture, although dominant cultural patterns often correspond to various agricultural investments. For example, Africa's Windward Coast was later commonly referred to as the Rice Coast in recognition of the large numbers of Africans enslaved from that area who worked on rice plantations in America.
Language
Most anthropologists and historians speculate but have not confirmed that the term Gullah—deemed the cultural name of the islanders—derived from any one of several African ethnicities or specific locations in Angola and on the Windward Coast. Other researchers speculate that Gullah and Geechee are borrowed words from any number of ethnic groups along the Windward Coast—such as Gola, Kissi, Mende, Temne, Twi, and Vai—that contributed to the creolization of the coastal culture in Georgia and South Carolina.
Gullah is thought to be a shortened form of Angola, the name of the group first imported to the Carolinas during the early colonial period. Geechee, historically considered a negative word identifying Sea Islanders, became an acceptable term in light of contemporary evidence linking it to West Africa. Although the origins of the two words are not definitive, some enslaved Africans along the coast had names that were linked to the Kissi group, leading to speculation that the terms may also derive from that particular culture.
Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner researched and documented spoken words on the coast during the 1930s, traced similarities to ethnic groups in West Africa, then published the Gullah dialect lexicon, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949). His research confirms the evolution of a new language based on West African influences and English. Many words in the coastal culture could be matched to ethnic groups in West Africa, thereby linking the Geechee/Gullah people to their origins. Margaret Washington Creel in A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (1988) identifies cultural and spiritual habits that relate to similar ethnic groups of West Africans who are linked by language. Her research on the coastal culture complements Turner's findings that Africans on the Sea Islands created a new identity despite the tragic conditions of slavery.
Cultural Heritage
Documentation of the developing culture on the Georgia islands dates to the nineteenth century. By the late twentieth century, researchers and scholars had confirmed a distinctive group and identified specific commonalities with locations in West Africa. The rice growers' cultural retention has been studied through language, cultural habits, and spirituality. The research of Mary A. Twining and Keith E. Baird in Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia (1991) investigates the common links of islanders to specific West African ethnicities.
Theenslaved rice growers from West Africa brought with them knowledge of how to make tools needed for rice harvesting, including fanner baskets for winnowing rice. The sweetgrass baskets found on the coastal islands were made in the same styles as baskets found in the rice culture of West Africa. Sweetgrass baskets also were used for carrying laundry and storing food or firewood. Few present-day members of the Geechee/Gullah culture remember how to select palmetto, sweetgrass, and pine straw to create baskets, and the remaining weavers now make baskets as decorative art, primarily for tourists.
Religious meetings in "praise houses" were the spiritual outlet for enslaved Africans on the plantation. Fast-paced rhythmic hand clapping accompanied ring shout (spiritual) songs while participantsmoved counterclockwise in a circle, making certain never to cross their feet. Some aspects of the ring shout are thought to be related to the communal dances found in many West African traditions. The word shout is thought to be derived from saut, a West African word of Arabic origin that describes an Islamic religious movement performed to exhaustion. Since the Civil War (1861-65), ring shouts have been held after Sunday church services and on weeknights in community meeting houses. Few elders familiar with shout songs and the body movements associated with the spiritual practice are alive today, but the tradition is kept alive in Georgia through the McIntosh County Shouters.
In the early 1930s Lorenzo Dow Turner recorded a song that islander Amelia Dawley had been taught by her mother, Octavia "Tawba" Shaw, who was born into slavery. Dawley taught the song to her own daughter, Mary Moran, who became the last person in the United States to know the song, which would link her to a small village in Sierra Leone sixty years later. Anthropologist Joseph Opala, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, and linguist Tazieff Koroma came across Turner's tape recording in 1989 and began tracing its origin, not only to Moran, who was living in Harris Neck, Georgia, but also to Bendu Jabati of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, who was the last person in her village with knowledge of the song.
In 1997 the two women met in the African village to share and reenact what was understood as a Mende funeral song, sung only by the women of Jabati's family lineage, who conducted the funerals of the village. Evidence suggests that a female member of Moran's family had been forced into captivity from the village nearly 200 years before. The return of the song and the visit from the Moran family led to a countrywide celebration that can be viewed in the documentary The Language You Cry In (1998). The discovery of the song and subsequent linguistic research confirmed yet another link between the cultures of West Africa and the Georgia coast.
Such corresponding practices as similar names, language structures, folktales, kinship patterns, and spiritual transference are but a few areas that suggest a particular link between the southeastern coastal culture of the United States and Sierra Leone in West Africa.
Migration
Thousands of slaves from Georgia and South Carolina who remained loyal to the British at the end of the American Revolution (1775-83) found safe haven in Nova Scotia in Canada and thus gained their freedom. Many returned to Sierra Leone in 1791 and the following year established Freetown, the capital city. Members of that group are identified today as Krio.
Runaway slaves from the Sea Islands were harbored under Spanish protection in Florida prior to the Second Seminole War (1835-42). Native American refugees from around the South formed an alliance with African runaways to create the Seminole Nation. The name Seminole is from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning runaway. The 1842 agreement between the United States and Spain, which ended the Seminole hold on Florida, caused a migration to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Some Seminoles followed Spanish protectors to Cuba and to Andros Island in the Bahamas.
Aspects of West African heritage have survived at each stage of the circle of migration, with rice, language, and spirituality persisting as cultural threads into the twentieth century. The Geechee/Gullah culture on the Sea Islands of Georgia has retained a heritage that spans two continents. At the end of the Civil War, lands on the coastal islands were sold to the newly freed Africans during the Port Royal Experiment, part of the U.S. government's Reconstruction plan for the recovery of the South after the war.
During the 1900s, land on some of the islands—Cumberland, Jekyll, Ossabaw, Sapelo, and St. Simons—became resort locations and reserves for natural resources. The modern-day conflict over resort development on the islands presents yet another survival test for the Geechee/Gullah culture, the most intact West African culture in the United States. Efforts to educate the public by surviving members of the Geechee/Gullah community, including Cornelia Bailey of Sapelo Island and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, help to maintain and protect the culture's unique heritage in the face of such challenges.