Michelle Obama’s ancestry has been traced by genealogist Megan Smolenyak and the NY Times, and the study has revealed that Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were Melvinia Shields, a slave, and some unknown white man (NY Times 10/8/09, p. 1).  In 1850 as a little six-year-old slave girl, she was taken from her family and given as a bequest in a will to faraway relatives of the slave owner. She fathered four children, three of them mulattos, the first perhaps as early as 15.  The father of this child, this unknown white man, is the male ancestor of the woman who now resides in the White House as our First Lady. 

Who was he?  Was he the “master” of the household?  Was he one of the sons?  Was he one of the itinerant workers who passed through from time to time?  The surname the children were given was the name of the patriarch, but that was a common practice in those days, no matter who the father was. 

After freedom came, Melvinia stayed on an adjacent farm as a laborer.  One of her children was born four years after emancipation.  What does that fact suggest about the complexities of slavery and the difficulties of “freedom”?  Melvinia finally broke away when she was in her 30′s or 40′s, and was able to reunite with former slaves from her early childhood.  But so much remained unknown for Melvinia.  When she died in her 90′s, her 1938 death certificate, signed by a relative, states “don’t know” in the space where parents would be named. 

Melvinia’s first child was Dolphus T. Shields, who made his way to Birmingham, Alabama, and became a prosperous businessman and the co-founder of two churches, both of which later were active in the Civil Rights movement.  Dolphus’s carpentry shop was in the white section of town, a rarity for black businesses, and being of light color, he mixed easily with whites.  Dolphus died in 1950 at the age of 91.  On the very day that his obituary appeared on the front page of the Birmingham World, a black newspaper, the paper also ran a headline “U.S. Court Bans Segregation in Diners and Higher Education.”  Things change.

Things do change.  This is the truth I want to always keep before me when I despair of my country and the lack of progress we seem to make on so many crucial issues.  Things change.  They don’t change quickly or easily.  Things don’t change automatically, or just because time passes. Things change because it is right that they should change, and good people throughout time provide the leadership for those changes.  Things change because people keep at it, keep working for years, often with little success, but keeping the vision before them always. 

Michelle Obama, whose ancesters were slaves, is in the White House.  When we would become discouraged in our labor, let us remember: things change.