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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"There were no jobs here," said Harolyn Siau, a Robinson cousin and retired teacher. "I guess a man who thought like he thought, he wouldn't want to do ordinary stuff." A Robinson family friend had moved to Chicago, and Fraser Robinson Jr. decided to follow him -- at least for a while.

The Time Has Come?

When the Obama campaign began compiling the Robinson genealogy, aides had no idea what they might find. And Michelle Obama still knows very little about her other grandparents, although she was told LaVaughn was a Mississippi preacher's granddaughter.

But the Robinson story says plenty. At least three of Fraser Sr.'s sons -- Michelle Obama's great-uncles -- joined the military. One daughter moved to Princeton, N.J., where she worked as a maid, and she cooked Southern-style meals for Michelle and her brother, Craig, when they were students at Princeton University.

Connie Jones's father, Thomas Robinson, served for 25 years as the beloved principal of an elementary school in an African American community that had formed near the Friendfield property line.

"It makes more sense to me," Obama said. "If the patriarch in our lineage was one-armed Fraser, a shoemaker with one arm, an entrepreneur, someone who was able to own property, and with sheer effort and determination was able to build a life in this town -- that must have been the messages that my grandfather got."

In January, Obama spoke at Bethel AME to a packed crowd that included at least 30 family members. Word spread quickly through the Robinson clan that one of their own could be White House bound. "God is absolutely amazing!" Thomas Nelson, a cousin who works at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, wrote in an entry posted on the Obama campaign blog.

And yet there is a wariness about delving too deep. Relatives, including Jones and Siau, have been approached by scores of reporters, but they are uneasy about speaking about their cousin for fear of stoking racial tensions and damaging her husband's chances.

Scholars of slavery and the South believe Obama could become a catalyst for allaying such fears. "It could play out in a dozen different ways, but there's no question that people are now ready to hear this," said Peter H. Wood, a Duke University history professor and an expert on the antebellum South. "They're ready to hear that she's proud, not ashamed, and how she can make other people feel okay about it.

"So she becomes, in some ways, the Alex Haley of her generation," Wood said, referring to the author who traced his African ancestry in the celebrated novel "Roots."

On that trip in January, Obama drove by Friendfield, just as she did when she was a girl, but this time she looked out the car window and noted the historic marker. Next time she's in town, she said, she would like to see the place.

"There are probably thousands of one-armed Frasers, all over this country," she said, "who out of slavery and emancipation, because they were smart and worked hard, those American values, were able to lift themselves up and begin to set these little foundations that led to me."