Slave cabins still stand at the Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South
Carolina. The whitewashed, wooden structures in Slave Street, a sandy track
at the back of the plantation owner’s house, were once crammed with captive
African labourers. No more than sheds really, the cabins have no heating, no
glass and no indoor plumbing, and are propped up on brick pillars to keep
out flood water and visiting snakes.
The Withers family relied on more than 300 Africans to bring in the rice crop
from their fields along the Sampit River. Among their slaves in the mid-19th
century was a tall, hardworking, God-fearing man named Jim Robinson. His
remains probably lie in the slave graveyard in the swampy land down by the
river’s edge and his fate might well have been to disappear from history,
like so many other slaves, except he is the great-great-grandfather of
America’s new First Lady.
Michelle Obama’s family embodies the tragic yet triumphant journey of
African-Americans. Slavery is a bitter history that many would prefer to
forget, but it continues to cast a dark shadow over a nation that was
founded on the promise that “all men are created equal” and endowed with the
“unalienable rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Though
it may seem like a phenomenon of an impossibly distant past, slavery is only
just outside living memory. The last slave cabin at Friendfield was vacated
in the Sixties and one of Robinson’s granddaughters, who heard stories about
him from her father, still lives in a whitewashed, breeze-block bungalow on
the edge of the Friendfield lands.
Carrie Nelson, 80, can barely contain her emotion when she imagines what her
grandfather would think of one of his descendants moving into the White
House. “I think it’s beautiful. If he was still alive, I think he would – oh
Lord! – be so grateful. He would be so happy.”
Although Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated Emancipation Proclamation was made in
1863, it took a further two years before slavery was officially abolished in
America’s remaining slave-owning states, with the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, and another century to end legal segregation in the South.
Before the victory of the Civil Rights Movement black people were banned from
using the same toilets, water fountains, schools and even bus stations as
their white counterparts. The last antimiscegenation laws, which barred
marriage and sex between blacks and whites, were overturned by the Supreme
Court only in 1967, and in 2000 Alabama became the last state to remove
language prohibiting inter-racial marriage from its state constitution.
Before this remarkable year, almost no African-Americans expected a black man
to become President of the United States. Barack Obama himself acknowledged
on the campaign trail that some voters might worry that “he doesn’t look
like all those other presidents on the dollar bills”. The Rev Joseph Jones,
pastor of Mrs Obama’s grandparents’ church in Georgetown, certainly never
expected it to happen in his lifetime. “Because of the history of slavery
and segregation, even though blacks have made tremendous progress in the
United States, blacks are still a minority and racism still exists. It was
not something I even imagined.” As the Obama campaign gained momentum, the
changing mood of African-Americans was encapsulated by the magazine Ebony,
which declared on its cover “In our lifetime”. “It’s [a] landmark. We all
realise that,” Peter Wood, a history professor at Duke University, North
Carolina, said.
Over almost four centuries, countless Africans were chained in slave ships for
the dreaded “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic. Although there is no
definitive total, Unesco estimates that 14,270,000 Africans were sold into
slavery in the New World. By the time of the American Revolution, one out of
five people in the Colonies was a slave, and the majority of people in South
Carolina were black (African-Americans now make up about an eighth of the US
population). So many slaves were shipped to South Carolina’s Lowcountry that
the region is sometimes described as the Ellis Island of African-Americans –
a reference to the immigration station in New York harbour that processed
tens of millions of new arrivals from Europe – and that Mrs Obama can trace
her family back to this area shows the extent of her African-American roots.
Her husband has called her “the most quintessentially American woman I know”
and her lineage could displace that of Alex Haley, the author of Roots,
as the model of the African-American experience.
The Friendfield Plantation dates to 1733 when John Ouldfield received a
630-acre land grant along the Sampit River. James Withers, a wealthy
brickmaker, indigo planter and rice farmer from Charleston, bought the
property the following year and it remained in his family until 1879. Before
the civil war, rice cultivation in South Carolina made plantation owners
immensely rich – the port of Georgetown even shipped its “Carolina Gold” to
China – and the convention is that slaves provided only labour, but recent
academic research has revised this view. In her book Black Rice,
Professor Judith Carney argues that slaves from the “Rice Coast” of West
Africa taught their owners much of how to grow the crop. An early newspaper
advertisement in Charleston, for example, offered for sale 250 slaves “from
the Windward and Rice Coast, valued for their knowledge of rice culture”.
History does not record how Jim Robinson arrived on the Friendfield
Plantation. Research by The Washington Post shows that he was born in
about 1850 and suggests that he lived on the plantation as a slave until the
civil war. The 1880 census describes him living near the plantation’s white
owners as an illiterate farmhand with a three-year-old son, Gabriel. A
second son, Fraser, Mrs Obama’s great-grandfather, was born in 1884.
Ms Nelson said: “He was my grand-daddy. He was dead before I was born. All I
know about him was my dad said he was a farmer and a coalminer at a time. He
was an honest man. I had just one picture. It burned in a fire.
He was tall and slender. He was a church man. My dad did not talk too much
about his dad, but he said he was hardworking, he was a family man and he
was a Christian.” Her father, Gabriel, never spoke about slavery. “He did
not want to talk about that. He said it was too painful to talk about.”
Gabriel and Fraser’s mother died when they were young and, although their
father remarried, they were raised by other families. Records show that
Fraser, whose arm was amputated at a young age, was a “house boy” with the
family of Francis Nesmith, believed to be the son of an overseer at another
plantation. “The man who adopted Uncle Fraser was a mail carrier,” Ms Nelson
said of Mr Nesmith. “He went to work in the post office. He took Uncle
Fraser along to deliver the mail. He liked the little boy and Uncle Fraser
liked going around with him. He treated him like he was one of his own.” Jim
Robinson’s sons did relatively well. Fraser taught himself to read and
worked as a shoemaker, a newspaper salesman and in a lumber mill job. His
brother worked in a turpentine crew and bought a small farm near the
plantation. The next generation took different routes.
T here is a great divide that characterises so many black families in America,
between those who stayed in the rural South and those who went to the
industrial North. Runaway slaves had been fleeing northwards since the early
19th century, but large-scale migration did not take place until after the
civil war, when wave after wave of black people left the South to find work
and a better life. Mrs Obama’s family was part of these “great migrations”.
When the Great Depression hit, Ms Nelson stayed on the edge of the
plantation, but at least five of her cousins moved away. Three of Fraser’s
sons joined the military and his daughter went to Princeton, New Jersey,
where she worked as a maid. Fraser Jr, who had worked in a sawmill, went to
Chicago. Once there, he took a postal job – perhaps a throwback to his
father’s early days accompanying his postman-mentor.
“That is the great African-American story: that during slavery times about
nine out of ten lived in the South and by World War One and beyond there
[was] this huge migration outward,” Mr Wood said. “It went in waves. There
was a wave [after the end of the Civil War that] set up little black towns
in places like Kansas and Oklahoma. Then there was migration northward
around World War One when white northern workers were going off to war and
jobs were created in places like Pittsburgh and Chicago. Then in the 1920s
there was a famous flood on the Mississippi River and a lot of people got
out of share-cropping and moved north. The connections were maintained. You
get these extended families, with some in the urban North and some in the
rural South, but staying in touch, sometimes with money going back and
forth.”
The South remained racist and segregated. Thousands of black people were
lynched as the Ku Klux Klan grew in strength. Edna Hales Knox, 78, a retired
teacher, said that growing up black in Georgetown meant constant
humiliation. “That was the way it was then: blacks could not get too close
to whites, even though we worked for them,” she said. “The water fountains
said ‘coloreds’ or ‘whites’. The doctor’s office as well. We had to sit in
the back of the bus. When we got to the bus station, we could not even go in
to go to the restroom.”
Frances Cheston Train, 82, whose family bought Friendfield in 1930 as a
hunting estate, can recall playing with the black children who lived in the
cabins in Slave Street. “When I had a black child over to play, she would be
spirited into the back kitchen to eat and I would eat with my family and
then we would rejoin each other,” she said. Ms Cheston Train, a member of
the Drexel banking family who married into the Vanderbilt railway family, is
an ardent fan of the Obamas. “The idea of having our First Lady a descendant
of a slave made us very proud of America. We hope she will come visit the
place. We are proud to be part of such a wonderful progress of
African-Americans. Imagine having a President and a First Lady in these
short years. I could not have imagined that,” she said.
In the North, black people struggled with de facto segregation. They were
packed into housing estates in inner city “ghettos”, went to poor schools
and had to contend with low-paid jobs. Mrs Obama’s grandparents, Fraser Jr
and LaVaughn Robinson, lived in a breeze-block home in Chicago and her
father, Fraser Robinson III, worked for the city maintaining boilers at a
water-filtration plant. Yet the North offered great opportunities, too.
Chicago became a magnet for black activists. Mrs Obama’s family lived on the
city’s South Side not far from figures such as Muhammad Ali, Rev Jesse
Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Carol Moseley-Brown, the first black woman to
serve in the US Senate.
The Civil Rights Movement began in the South on December 1, 1955, when Rosa
Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to
a white passenger, and eventually culminated in the repeal of the Jim Crow
segregation laws in the South (named after a black caricature figure in
popular entertainment). But racial tensions of the period sparked riots in
black neighbourhoods across the nation, from New York to Los Angeles, and
black people outside the South embraced a more radical philosophy of Black
Power. Coming of age in the North in the postcivil rights era, Mrs Obama
thrived. She studied at Princeton and Harvard Law School, became a lawyer
and eventually vice-president of community and external affairs at the
University of Chicago Medical Centre before going on the campaign trail. It
is noticeable that her success is viewed in South Carolina as simply another
example of the family’s striving. Bunny Rodrigues, a historian and friend of
the family, noted that Mrs Obama’s cousin Thomas Robinson, who stayed in the
South, also enjoyed great success: he became the first black headmaster of a
local primary school. “They are a very strong family. Not all of them went
north. Some of them stayed south and did extremely well,” she said.
Mrs Obama’s grandparents returned to the South and retired to Georgetown,
where they joined the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal church, at which
Rev Jones preaches. In January Mrs Obama, who spent summers in Georgetown as
a child, returned for a family reunion at the church. She was joined by 31
delighted relatives. The visit came soon after her husband’s primary win in
overwhelmingly white Iowa, and at the time the Rev Jones thought that Mr
Obama was probably just a “flash in the pan”. Now the family descended from
slaves is celebrating their arrival, and the arrival of the first black
Americans, in the White House. Ms Nelson said that she was looking forward
to attending the inauguration. “I would love to go to the White House,” she
said. “Michelle is a beautiful person.”
