American tapestry : the story of the black, white, and multiracial ancestors of Michelle Obama / Rachel L. Swarns

Includes bibliographical references (p. [357]-367) and index.

Michelle Obama's family saga is a remarkable, quintessentially American story--a journey from slavery to the White House in five generations. Prodigiously researched, American Tapestry traces the complex and fascinating tale of Michelle Obama's ancestors, a history that the First Lady did not even know herself. Rachel L. Swarns, a correspondent for the New York Times, brings into focus the First Lady's black, white, and multiracial forebears, and reveals for the first time the identity of Mrs. Obama's white great-great-great-grandfather--a man who remained hidden in her lineage for more than a century. American Tapestry illuminates the lives of the ordinary people in Mrs. Obama's family tree who fought for freedom in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; who endured the agonies of slavery, the disappointment of Reconstruction, the displacement of the Great Migration, and the horrors of Jim Crow to build a better future for their children. Swarns even found a possible link to the Jewish Reform movement. Though it is an intimate family history, American Tapestry is also the collective chronicle of our changing nation, a nation in which racial intermingling lingers in the bloodlines of countless citizens and slavery was the crucible through which many family lines--black, white, and Native American--were forged. Epic in scope and beautifully rendered, this is a singularly inspiring story with resonance for us all.