A Family Tree Rooted In American Soil

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A Family's Exodus From Slavery

Michelle Obama's great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, worked as a slave on the Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, S.C. Many of the slave quarters on the plantation still stand untouched and alone on the property.

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When Gabriel and Fraser Robinson were young, their mother died and Jim remarried. When Fraser was about 10, Nelson recounted, he ventured into the woods to collect firewood, and "a little sapling fell on his arm and it broke." His stepmother brushed off the injury. But the wound became infected, and Fraser's left arm had to be amputated.

One witness to the tumultuous Robinson family scene was a white man named Francis Nesmith, the son of an overseer at another plantation and a regular visitor to Friendfield. As Gabriel Robinson told his daughter, Fraser would tag along with Nesmith, and Nesmith grew fond of the one-armed boy. Aware of Fraser's difficult home life, Nesmith asked Jim Robinson if the boy could come live with him.

"He said he would take good care of him, and he did," Nelson said. "Uncle Fraser and that man's children grew up together."

In the 1900 Census, Fraser is listed as a "house boy" living with the Nesmith family. At 16, he could not read or write. But the Nesmith children attended school, and their parents were literate. That left an impression on her uncle, Nelson said.

"They pushed their kids hard into education, and one day Uncle Fraser would, too, because that's what he learned from them," she said of the Nesmiths.

Keenly aware of his wife's heritage, Barack Obama has called Michelle "the most quintessentially American woman I know." During his speech on race in Philadelphia this spring, he noted, "I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners."

A white ancestor has long been an assumption in the Robinson family, but there is no evidence of who it was. It is something Michelle Obama would like to know; but even with that still a mystery, she draws a lesson from her family history.

"An important message in this journey is that we're all linked," she said. "We are in fact, through our histories of growth and survival in this country. Somewhere there was a slave owner -- or a white family in my great-grandfather's time that gave him a place, a home, that helped him build a life -- that again led to me. So who were those people? I would argue they're just as much a part of my history as my great-grandfather."

Getting Ahead

Jim Robinson's sons prospered. Gabriel joined a turpentine crew and bought a farm west of Friendfield, a portion of which remains in the family. Fraser married Rosella Cohen, taught himself to read and worked as a shoemaker and a newspaper salesman in addition to a lumber mill job.

Dorothy Taylor, 89, who lives a block from Bethel AME and keeps an Obama picture book on her coffee table, recalls watching "Mr. Fraser Robinson" selling the local paper on a downtown street corner. All the students at Howard School, the county's only black high school, knew he took spare copies home each night so his children could read them.

"It was the belief that education was our salvation -- education and religion," Taylor said. "You've got to trust in God and learn all you can. Because we had meager lives. We had nothing."

Obama's grandfather was born in 1912. He was a standout student and was known as an orator, but at 18, census records show, Fraser Robinson Jr. was living at home with his parents and working at a local sawmill. It was a time when Georgetown blacks were losing the legal rights and social status they had started to gain after emancipation, and the local economy was in shambles.