This is Moses: Moses Shields, Sr.
The Shields Family: A Dichotomy of Race in US Society through
Two Family Lines
Introduction
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.
1 Roseanne Cash is a 6th generation descendant of W. B. Shields Sr. through his eldest daughter, and Michelle Obama descends from Melvinia’s first child, Dolphus, who is her greatgreat-grandfather.
This analysis will place a few key points in these two families in a broader historical context. One side follows W. B. Shields Sr., his eldest daughter Sarah A. Shields and her eldest son, Lafayette C. Robinson, across a timeline spanning early 1800s southwestern expansion into
Alabama and Texas, the fleeing of Unionists in Texas to Mexico during the American Civil War, and the days of San Antonio’s status as Texas’ largest city in the 1910s and 20s. The other side
follows Moses Shields, his son Henry Wells Shields, and the slave Melvinia who bore a son of mixed race that was ultimately left out of the white side of the conventional family history, but is later reclaimed through efforts surrounding her descendant, former First Lady Michelle Obama.
These particular points also demonstrate how anti-miscegenation laws throughout the United States prompted two wholly different responses to a mixed-race lineage—repression and manipulation—highlighting dichotomous responses to the social construct of race in American history.
QUOTE END QUOTE
Twitter
поставьте нам отметку «Нравится»
