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Book Reviews
American Tapestry:
The Story of the Black, White, and
Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama
by Rachel L. Swarns
“On November 4, 2008, Michelle Obama stood before a
crowd of thousands of roaring, singing and weeping sup-
porters in Chicago’s Grant Park... It was Election Night and
her husband had just become the first African-American
President of the United States…
Like many African-Americans… Mrs. Obama knew her
grandparents as a girl, but only bits and pieces about the rel-
atives who came before them. She had grown up hearing
whispers about white ancestors in her in her family tree, but
no one knew who they were…
The First Lady wanted her girls to understand their own
history, and she wanted to know more about it herself…
The only way to do that is to go backwards, one generation
at a time, peeling back the layers of history to unearth the
story of one remarkable family and one singular nation…
Let the ancestors tell their stories. Let them speak from
the grave!”
— Excerpted from the Introduction (pgs. 3-15)
Between Barack Obama’s heartfelt memoir “Dreams
from My Father” and a few further-enlightening, encyclo-
pedic biographies of the President written by the likes of
Dinesh Sharma (“Barack Obama
in Hawai’I and Indonesia”) and
David
Maraniss
(“Barack
Obama: The Story”), we have a
pretty complete picture of the
President’s heritage. Unfortu-
nately, the same couldn’t be said
about the First Lady prior to the
publication of this painstakingly-
researched opus.
Thus, the nation owes a debt of
gratitude to Rachel L. Swarns, a
reporter for the New York Times
since 1995, for donning her
investigative journalist cap to dig into Michelle Robinson
Obama’s past. The upshot of that quest resulted in a recon-
structed family tree going back to the 18th Century, includ-
ing a slave-owning white great-great-great grandfather.
He was a plantation owner who mated with teenaged
Melvinia Shields, Michelle’s maternal great-great-great
grandmother. From evidence unearthed, the author estab-
lishes that he victim was helpless to protest because she had
not only been “separated from any close family” since the
age of eight but was “living in a society that viewed a white
man’s rape of his slave women as a right, not a crime.”
Most of Michelle Obama’s ancestors lived in the Deep
South, with her paternal great-grandfather, James Preston
Johnson, who settled in Chicago in 1908, being among the
first to participate in the Great African-American Migration
northward. The book includes photos of both black and
white relatives, a motley crew whose progeny you hope
might someday have an opportunity to assemble to share a
beer in the Rose Garden, if not make up for lost generations
at a full-blown family reunion inside the White House.
The First Lady’s lineage as a most-intriguing, multiracial
mosaic.
The Black Chicago Renaissance
Edited by Darlene Clark Hine and John
McCluskey, Jr.
“Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1950s, black
Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that rivaled and,
some argued, exceeded the cultural outpouring in Harlem...
However, [it] has yet to receive its full due. This volume
addresses that neglect…
Black cultural artists in music and dance and in visual and
literary arts demonstrated cognizance of the centrality of
race and sex in the distribution of power, the ways in which
the social construction of both interacted to determine
social privileges and exclusions. The challenge was to
deconstruct racial categories and rid ‘blackness’ of its neg-
ative symbolism.”
— Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. xv-xvi)
Since the Harlem Renaissance, New York has been con-
sidered the unofficial capital of black America. However,
that designation might be undeserving when one reflects
upon Chicago’s considerable
contributions not only culturally,
but socially and politically.
For example, the Windy City
sent its first African-American to
Congress sixteen years before the
Big Apple which only elected
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in
1944. Furthermore, half of the six
black U.S. Senators in history
represented Illinois, and I know I
don’t have to tell you that Presi-
dent Obama hails from Chicago.
In terms of the arts, the city
boasted such icons as novelist Richard Wright, choreogra-
pher Katherine Dunham, and poets Arna Bontemps, Mar-
garet Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks during its heyday.
What’s ironic is that at the very same time they were pro-
moting positive images of African-Americans, Amos ‘n’
Andy, a minstrel radio show originating in Chicago, was
doing just the opposite.
The white stars of that popular program did demeaning
impersonations featuring “mispronounced words, garbled
grammar and characterizations of black women as bossy
and black men as clownish.” Meanwhile, A. Philip Ran-
dolph was organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters into a union to demand a living wage from the
Chicago Pullman Car Company, “the single-largest
employer of black people in the United States.”
An impressive history lesson and compendium of fasci-
nating factoids proving that the so-called Second City need
not take a back seat to New York, at least when discussing
the achievements of its African-American intelligentsia.
Who Would Have Thunk It!
The First Adventures of the Fraser Foster Kids
by George C. Fraser and Emma Fraser-Pendleton
“Our story began a very long time ago when we were lit-
tle kids with no place to live. Our mother got sick and our
father had to give us up, so we were put into a shelter—and
then foster homes. We were in foster homes for 13 years! It
was very hard, but we made it…
Some people think foster families are these amazing folks
who just want to help needy children… But those weren’t
Take time to read
www.theskanner.com
by Kam Williams
Special To The Skanner News
the ones we ever got… It made us wonder why people who
didn’t even like kids took us in.
It wasn’t until later that we realized it was about money.
You see, the city gave families a monthly check for every
child they took in…
It worked for us.”
— Excerpted from the Foreword (pgs. 4-5)
George and Emma Fraser and were born to a woman who
gave birth to 11 children before succumbing to a mental ill-
ness that would leave her institutionalized for the last 37
years of her life. A half-dozen of the kids had the same
father, a man who was so overwhelmed by the responsibil-
ity of being a single-dad that he turned his offspring to the
foster care system.
At least Mr. Fraser insisted that George, Emma and their
youngest sibling, Joe, never be separated but instead always
be placed with the same family. Unfortunately, most of the
foster parents the trio had to
endure turned out to be sadistic
scoundrels who were only in it
for the payments they got from
the state as opposed to having an
altruistic concern for the welfare
of vulnerable orphans.
Joe passed on at an early age,
but George and Emma went on to
overcome a traumatic childhood
marked by torture, teasing, insta-
bility and an absence of love,
eventually earning college
degrees and enjoying impressive
professional careers. Who Would Have Thunk It, a “fac-
tional” account of “how we wished it could have been,” is
a heartbreaking semi-autobiographical memoir co-written
by George and Emma.
Illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Jerry Craft, this
mix of real life and make believe was cleverly crafted as a
combination cautionary fable for adults and message of
hope for children who might currently find themselves
stuck in a similar predicament. A frightening, foster care
nightmare with a fortuitous fairytale ending.
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September 5, 2012
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