Michelle Obama's Roots

Michelle Obama is one of the lucky few African-Americans who she can trace her roots back to 1850. Her great-great-great-grandmother, it turns out, was a six year old slave girl named Melvinia in South Carolina. We can see the First Lady’s maternal family tree – painstakingly developed by a notable genealogist – on the front page of The New York Times. We can even see the original documents and follow her story in an interactive website.

Most African-Americans are not so lucky. An ordinary person searching for African-American family origins runs into obstacles born out of racism and neglect.

My search for the African-American Slaydens is a case in point. I’m looking for the black Slaydens who are the direct descendents of slaves owned by my great-great-great-grandfather William Everett Slayden. William Everett was a white slave holder who lived in Dickson County, Tennessee.

Our last posting tracked – as best as we can with limited records – the story of Julia Slayden. Census records prior to 1850 list only the name of each slaveholder and the number and gender of his slaves. Julia shows up on the census records of 1840 as a tick by William Everett’s name under the column for “female slaves over 10 and under 24.”

The census records for 1850 and 1860 tell us a bit more, including both the gender and birth date of each slave. So we know that in 1850 William Everett owned a “female mulatto” age 30 – probably Julia. In 1860, William Everett’s son owned a “black female” age 40 – again, probably Julia.

We first see Julia Slayden by name in the 1870 census. After freedom, Julia lives in a nearby county with her children. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that William Everett most likely fathered Julia’s son, William Slayden.

A few African-Americans – like Michelle Obama –find the name of their ancestor recorded in a will. The slave master who owned six-year old Mevinia named her in his will, along with his household goods and cattle.

Unfortunately for the black Slaydens, William Everett left a will but failed to identify any of his eight slaves by name. In fact, he didn’t mention them at all. Presumably they passed to his heirs along with his land, his furniture and his other personal property.

The professional genealogist who tracked the First Lady’s maternal line discovered that Melvinia – the little slave girl who was Michelle Obama’s great-great-great grandmother – was taken from her family and sent to work at the farm in Georgia owned by Henry Shields.

When she was a teenager, Mevinia became pregnant by an unidentified white man at the Shields farm. Michelle Obama’s family on her mother’s side still goes by the name of Shields, and she can now trace her maternal roots back through this family.

But what about the black Slaydens and the thousands of other African-American families who have only the vaguest idea of their family history?

Unlike Michelle Obama's family, my African-American Slayden ancestors show up in only a small handful of public records. I’m not a professional genealogist, but I can piece together their stories through a handful of public records and the census reports from 1820 up through 1920. But there the trail goes cold.

There are websites like Common Roots devoted to African-American genealogy. Ancestor.com, a commercial data base, has a special African-American portal. With their help, I may be able to find the living descendents of the African-American Slaydens.

I hope the story of the black Slaydens – like that of Michelle Obama – has a happy ending.

On the television show, Henry Louis Gates helps famous African-Americans like Chris Rock and ordinary people like David Wilson trace their family history back through slavery to their African roots. At the end, they meet the descendents of the former slave owners.

Everyone gathers, uneasy at first –on the grounds of the old plantation – to drink lemonade and eat barbequed chicken. In the end, the African-American and the white family members shake hands and hug one other. There is general forgiveness all around.

Life is not so simple. The African-American branch of the Slayden family, after all, did not choose this lineage. But the African-American and the white Slaydens bear the same surname, we share a common history, and – in some important way – we make up one “family.” Some day – like Michelle Obama – I too hope to find my cousins.

Find “Common Roots” at http://blackgenealogy.blogspot.com/

The Michelle Obama story is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/us/politics/08genealogy.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=michelle%20obama&st=cseMichelle

For a collection of slave narratives, see “North American Slave Narratives” at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/

Race Talk -- The Story of Julia Slayden

It sneaked up on us.

Just when we thought America was “post racial,” Sgt. James Crowley – a white Cambridge police officer – arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr. – a prominent African-American Harvard professor – at Gates’ own house.

Along with the ensuing media frenzy, President Obama invited both the Cambridge cop and the Harvard professor to the White House for a beer meeting. He wanted both sides to talk and see each other’s racial perspective on the incident.

But a lot of people are tired of race talk. Blogger and author Ta-Nehisi Coates complains that our obsession with dialogue about race is “nauseating.”

But if we Americans quit talking about race, we’ll forget our painful roots. We’ll forget the scars of America’s history that informed Gates’ instinctive (and perhaps incorrect) charge that Crowley’s behavior was race-based.

Here’s where the story of the African-American Slaydens enters the picture.

Julia Slayden – the subject of today’s race talk – was born a slave in Virginia in 1820. Julia was owned by the Slaydens, and she migrated with the family from Virginia to Tennessee.

In 1850, we find Julia among the slaves owned by William Everett Slayden in Dickson County, Tennessee. A few years later, William Everett gave or sold Julia to his son, Tolbert Slayden.

After freedom, Julia and her kin – like many freed slaves – took the Slayden family name.

The 1870 census – the first taken after freedom – shows Julia Slayden in Maury County, just a few miles southeast of Dickson County.

Julia, then 50 years old, lived with Peter Slayden (age 37) and four children – William (age 14), Russell (age 12), James (age 10) and Seymore (age 2). They were relatively prosperous: Peter, a carpenter, had marketable skills and owned personal property worth $225. Julia worked as a housekeeper and owned property valued at $100.

Why did Julia move her family to Maury County? We can only guess, of course. But she most likely settled there so the children could attend school.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau. In Tennessee, the Bureau offered free food, clothing and medical care and tried to protect the newly-won civil rights of the freedmen.

The Freedman’s Bureau also set up free schools for black children. Among these was the School for Freedmen on Green’s Mill Road in Spring Hill, Maury County, Tennessee.

But the Freedmen’s Bureau, particularly the freedmen’s schools, incensed some former slave owners. The infamous Ku Klux Klan, organized in Tennessee in 1866, soon began intimidating and terrorizing African-Americans.

In 1868 Klan violence broke out in Columbia, the capitol of Maury County. A group of African-American school children were marching to a picnic to celebrate the Fourth of July when four to five hundred masked horsemen attacked them on the court house square. The attackers wore red and white robes and carried white flags, some with the letters KKK embroidered in red.

This vicious assault on innocent school children struck close to Julia Slayden, who lived only a few miles from Columbia. William, Russell and James – her three older children – attended school, mostly likely the Freedmen’s Bureau school at nearby Spring Hill.

Julia could well have seen with her own eyes the vicious Klan attack on the children’s Independence Day procession. The Slayden children even may have been among the school kids assaulted by the masked white-robed terrorists.

One of Julia’s children – William Slayden – is of special interest to our story because the boy may be a blood relative of the white Slaydens. The 1870 census identifies Julia as “black” but describes William as “mulatto,” suggesting that his father was white.

William was born in 1856, when Julia lived in the household of William Everett Slayden. In 1856 – the year of William’s birth – William Everett was a widower. Census records show that in 1860, William Everett owned a four-year old boy child. William may well have been named after his father.

So where are the descendents of Julia and William Slayden today? After 1870, they disappeared from the public record, and we don’t know what happened to them after that.

Let’s hope that some day we can find Julia’s descendents, living African-American Slaydens who remember a great-great-great grandma named Julia and her son William.

But even if we never meet Julia’s people, we will remember their story: Julia and her children were born into slavery; after freedom she did her best to support and educate her children; and Julia and her family survived the Ku Klux Klan.

And – hardest for me – we will remember that the white Slaydens held Julia and her children in bondage for almost fifty years.

I don’t know the extent of the responsibility – if any – that the white Slaydens today bear for the wrongs committed to Julia and her family over a century ago. But I do know that if we don’t keep the race talk going, we’ll never heal the painful wounds that opened again last week in Cambridge when a white cop arrested an African-American professor.

Changing The Complexion of Things: The Slave Revolt That Didn’t Happen

Today a swimming club in Pennsylvania turned away a group of summer camp kids simply because they weren’t white. The swim club didn’t want to change “the complexion” of their pool. You can see the story at http://abcnews.go.com/US/story.

When the kids tried to swim, the whites left the water. ABC reported that one African-American boy heard one white person say, “Oh I’m scared they might harm my children or try to steal something from me.”

It’s hard to believe that this kind of stupidity and fear exists in 2009. But the swim club bigots remind us that throughout American history, white people’s stupidity and fear have led to unspeakable brutality and cruelty against African-Americans.

An episode in the story of the African-American and white Slaydens of Dickson County, Tennessee, illustrates the point.

Back in 1856, the Slaydens of Dickson County, Tennessee – both African-American and white – lived near the Cumberland Furnace, one of about thirty iron works in the “iron district” that stretched along the mountains of central Tennessee and southern Kentucky.

They say the first cannonball used by the Confederates was forged at Cumberland Furnace.

But the iron district ran on slave labor. 2,000 slaves labored – forced and unpaid – at forges and furnaces throughout the iron district. Over 200 slaves worked at the Cumberland Furnace alone.

In December of 1856, reports of a slave rebellion swept the countryside. By one account, a slave at Cumberland Furnace had informed his owner that slaves working in the iron furnaces were planning a general revolt.

The informant said he knew all about the plot, but would die before he would tell. “He thereupon received seven hundred and fifty lashes, from which he died.”

The rumored plot was to forge a bloody road to freedom: “The plan was to butcher the whites upon isolated farms and in the workshops, and then to march to each chief town of the county. They would thus have established a free road along the Cumberland from Nashville to Ohio.”

Shocking headlines announced, “Negro Insurrection in Southern Kentucky and Tennessee.” The hysteria was picked up daily by the press. “’The negroes are marching upon us,’ is heard from every mouth,” wrote one observer from neighboring Stewart County. “The whole village is in a state of anxiety; the white population is armed, and I see children, who can scarcely carry a gun . . . aiding to swell the number.”

Violence by white vigilante committees and patrols erupted throughout the iron district. Nineteen African-American men were hanged in one town in Stewart County. Dozens of “ringleaders” were jailed and whipped. “The jails in all the counties were crowded with the arrested blacks.”

In Dickson County, the local white people heard the rumors and “commenced the work of apprehending and punishing all the negroes whom they could find out, as having been engaged in said plot, or of having been cognizant of it.” The ones found guilty were locked in the Dickson County jail.

But the rumors weren’t true.

The New York Times reported: “We see no evidence of anything more than local disaffection, -- and many of the designs attributed to the negroes seem to rest upon vague and unreliable testimony.”

One recent historian characterized the episode as a “brutal suppression of a black insurrection which seems to have existed only in the panic-stricken minds of white southerners in 1856.”

We don’t know if the Slaydens – African-American or white – were caught up in the hysteria. We do know that the “rebellion” of 1856 preceded by only five years the great Civil War in which the African-American Slaydens finally won their freedom.

But here we are – a century and a half later – and some white people in Pennsylvania still don’t get it. Those little African-American boys and girls weren’t going to harm their children or steal their stuff. Those little kids just wanted to swim.

My African-American Cousins

The story of the African-American Slaydens opens with a romance. Back in 1705 in New Kent, Virginia, Sarah Slayden – a white woman – fell in love with a “mulatto” named John Bunch. Sarah and John petitioned the council of Virginia for permission to marry.

The council mulled over whether the colony’s laws would “prevent Negroes & White persons intermarrying.” But the council members – as politicians do – postponed their decision. To this day, we don’t know if Sarah Slayden and John Bunch were allowed to marry.

Sarah Slayden was most likely the sister or cousin of Arthur Slayden. Arthur’s son, Joseph Slayden, was a slave owner. Joseph ended up in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, where tobacco – and slave labor – ruled.

My great-great-great grandfather, William Everett Slayden, was the eleventh of Joseph’s 16 children. William Everett – who becomes a key player in the Slayden story – was born in 1789 in Pittsylvania County.

Around 1821, William Everett and other members of the Slayden family – including their African-American slaves – left Virginia for Tennessee. They settled in the Wood Valley, nestled in the rolling hills of Dickson County, Tennessee.

Dickson County was slave country, but there were no thousand-acre cotton plantations like the Deep South. Instead, farmers grew corn and tobacco on small tracts of land. Dickson County had no need for hundreds of slaves, and most families kept fewer than ten slaves.

William Everett Slayden was a wagon maker. According to family lore, he was an “expert wagon and buggy maker.” The tiny town of Slayden, Tennessee, probably named for William Everett’s brother, is still on the map.

In 1850, William Everett owned ten slaves, many of them children.

Sadly, our story of the African-American Slaydens begins here. But researching the African-American side of the family is a challenge. William Everett, apparently illiterate, marked his legal documents with an “X.” He left no letters or journals, and his will made no mention of the names or identity of his slaves.

So to research the African-American Slaydens, we have nothing but government records and census reports. As you’ll find out later, these records are grossly inadequate for researching African-American family history.*

But this blog will try – with these limited resources – to tell the stories of Julia Slayden, Allen Slayden, and Rufus Slayden. Hopefully, the living descendents of the African-American Slaydens will someday come forward so we can continue to piece together our common stake.

*If you’re interested in seeing the original historical records for this story, request an annotated version at carol.s.arnold@gmail.com.

Lynching Michael Jackson

The King of Pop is dead.

Michael Jackson – whatever you may think about his eccentricities – was huge. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Michael Jackson was the most successful entertainer of all time. “Thriller” was the world’s best-selling record ever.

As the King himself said, “The sound . . . of approval rolls across the universe, and the whole world abounds in magic.”

Now that he’s gone, maybe we can stop gossiping about his bizarre plastic surgeries, the rumored child abuse at Neverland, his weird ever-lightening skin color.

And in the midst of all this applause and blame, let’s look at the roots of Michael Jackson’s family. Michael’s father, Joseph Walter Jackson, was born in a tiny town in southern Arkansas in 1929. That year twenty-one African-Americans were brutally lynched in Arkansas.

To take just one story, in 1927 – just two years before Michael Jackson's father was born – a mentally disabled black man by the name of John Carter was charged with attacking two white people in Little Rock, the Arkansas capitol.

When Carter was captured, a frenzied mob of 100 people gathered and blocked the police from taking the prisoner to jail. Instead, the mob killed John Carter. After hanging him from a utility pole, they dragged his corpse through the city and burned his body in downtown Little Rock at 9th and Broadway.

Times were even worse back in the day of Michael’s grandfather, Samuel Jackson. Samuel – who died in 1993 at the age of 100 – grew up in the 1890’s when at least 35 black men were lynched in Arkansas. In just one thirty-day period the year before Samuel’s birth, eight African-Americans were lynched in Arkansas.

According to an 1892 news report, black Americans all over Arkansas were lynched “upon the slightest provocation: some being strung up to telegraph poles, others burnt at the stake and still others being shot like dogs.”

In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for the lynching of 4,742 African-Americans between 1882 and 1968. Even then, a dozen senators refused to sign as co-sponsors of the bill. They ducked a roll-call that would identify the opponents of the bill.

So was Michael Jackson scarred by this brutal history of lynching in America? Or did his talent and celebrity inoculate him against the pain and hurt of American racism?

Not likely. After Michael Jackson's arrest in 2003 for alleged child molesting, his brother Jermaine Jackson denounced the prosecution, saying "At the end of the day, this is nothing but a modern-day lynching.”

Today, we think we’re innocent of America’s dark racial history. We think we’re not guilty for our grandparents’ sins.

But think again. The death of an American icon serves as a reminder that we all have a common stake in coming to terms with America’s troubled racial past.

* * *

To read more about the past of lynching in America, go to “The Lynching Calendar” at http://www.autopsis.org/foot/lynchplaces1.html. For state-by-state information, see the AfriGeneas States Research Forum at http://www.afrigeneas.com/forum-states/index.

You can read the Congressional Record of the Senate’s resolution apologizing for lynching at http://www.iconn.org/documents/s%20res39CongressionalRecord6-13-2005SenateComments.pdf. Also see the news report at http://abcnews.go.com/WNT.

Waking Up To Our Common Roots

Back in 1952, Will Slayden – then almost seventy years old – was a sharecropper in West Tennessee. A folk music collector heard that Slayden played banjo, and he found the old black man working the fields with his mule.

Slayden hadn’t owned a banjo in twenty years, so the collector loaned him his five-string banjo.

Slayden played tunes in what he called "drag thumb," and Will’s wife Emma joined in to sing a few gospel songs. The folklorist recorded the Slaydens singing and playing.

The story of Will and Emma Slayden caught my attention because I, too, am a Slayden with roots in Tennessee.

When I was a child, my father on special occasions would unroll the Slayden family tree. We would all gaze respectfully at the fading blue-print, so big that it covered our dining room table.

The tree, prepared decades before by an ancient great-aunt, purported to record the birth, death and marriage of every Slayden going back to 1545.

But the old family tree, comprehensive as it was, left out not only Will and Emma Slayden, but their entire branch of the family – the African-American Slaydens. Curious, I set out to find the African-American Slaydens. Where did they come from? What connected our families?

After digging up shards of family history and scouring the Internet, I discovered that the link between the black Slaydens and the white Slaydens began in slave times. To my surprise, I learned that my great-great-great grandfather William Everett Slayden kept slaves at his homestead in Dickson County, Tennessee.

This is the story of three African-American families – Julia Slayden, Allen Slayden and Rufus Slayden.

These African-American Slaydens did not, of course, choose to be part of our family. But they did take on the family name; and for nearly a century, the Slaydens – both white and African-American – lived and worked together in the hills of Dickson County, Tennessee.

Our families are inextricably bound by this shared history. I hope that telling the story of Julia, Allen and Rufus Slayden – painful as it is – will kindle a spirit of forgiveness. Hopefully, telling this story will help us “find that common stake we all have in one another.”

Apologies for Slavery

Yesterday the US Senate passed a resolution calling for an official apology for slavery. We're sorry, say the senators, about segregation and "the fundamental injustice, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws." [The Seattle Times 6/19/09]

Oh that was a long time ago, you may think. A liberal white guy like ME didn't cause all that trouble way back then.

But what if YOUR family was one of those who did enslave people? What if your family was involved in that "injustice, brutality and inhumanity?"

This blog was inspired because MY family was among the guilty.

Check in next time for the story. And then -- whether you're white or African-American -- share your family's story.