{"id":62277,"date":"2021-11-15T20:28:26","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T20:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=62277"},"modified":"2021-11-20T20:06:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-20T20:06:35","slug":"the-shields-family-a-dichotomy-of-race-in-us-society-through-two-family-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=62277","title":{"rendered":"The Shields Family: A Dichotomy of Race in US Society through Two Family Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Shields Family: A Dichotomy of Race in US Society through Two Family Lines<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Methods of Historical Research: Spring 2021<\/a>
\nTexas A&M University, San Antonio<\/a>
\nApril 2021
\n18 pages<\/p>\n

Joseph C. Platt<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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

The history of the Shields families of North<\/a> and South Carolina<\/a>, beginning with William Bryant Shields Sr.<\/a> 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\u2019 son, Henry Wells Shields<\/a>, Henry\u2019s slave Melvinia Shields<\/a>, 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<\/a> and Michelle Obama<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,6940,20],"tags":[11097,32391,32393,32394,2099,32390,32392,4359,32389],"class_list":["post-62277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-henry-wells-shields","tag-joseph-c-platt","tag-melvinia-shields","tag-methods-of-historical-research","tag-michelle-obama","tag-moses-shields","tag-roseanne-cash","tag-texas-am-university","tag-william-bryant-shields-sr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62315,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62277\/revisions\/62315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}