Mixed Race Studies

The Shields Family: A Dichotomy of Race in US Society through Two Family Lines

Methods of Historical Research: Spring 2021
Texas A&M University, San Antonio
April 2021
18 pages

Joseph C. Platt

We spent the entirety of our Spring 2021 semester on Zoom, as our communities continued to struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of TAMUSA librarian Deirdre McDonald, we added the students’ research papers to the Digital Commons collection on Black San Antonio history we created the previous year.

The history of the Shields families of North and South Carolina, beginning with William Bryant Shields Sr. and Moses Shields respectively, offer dichotomous responses to American racial hierarchies over the decades. Generations of race mixing within the Shields family has its roots in the sons of Irish immigrants pursuing relationships with enslaved women. The one-sided nature of the power dynamic in these relationships takes on different dimensions in the lives of the mixed-race children of William Bryant Shields Sr. and the lives of Moses’ son, Henry Wells Shields, Henry’s slave Melvinia Shields, and her children. Both family lines take efforts to repress their black ancestry, one primarily through dilution through marriage and the other through a refusal of formal acknowledgement, which ironically enabled some of their children to flourish in African American society. The permeability of race can be gleaned through these two Shields family lines both in how they went about repressing their ties to enslaved black women and how these culminated in the present-day Shields descendants, Roseanne Cash and Michelle Obama.

Read the entire article here.

The First Family: A New Glimpse of Michelle Obama’s White Ancestors

The New York Times
2016-06-22

Rachel L. Swarns, Correspondent
New York Times

We knew that the Sunday article about Mrs. Obama’s white ancestors would stir considerable interest so we decided to invite readers to pose questions and make comments. We never imagined that one of those readers would provide us with the first glimpse of two key figures in the first lady’s family tree: The white man who owned Mrs. Obama’s great-great-great grandmother, Melvinia Shields, and his son, who most likely fathered Melvinia’s child.

The photograph of those two men and their relatives, which is believed to have been taken in Georgia sometime around 1884, is being published here for the first time.

The slaveowner was Henry Wells Shields, who inherited Melvinia when his father-in-law died in 1852. DNA testing and research indicate that he and his wife, Christian Patterson Shields, are the first lady’s great-great-great-great grandparents…

Read the entire article here.