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GEORGETOWN, S.C. —

Tiny wooden cabins line the dirt road once known as Slave Street as it winds from one side Friendfield Plantation.

More than 200 slaves lived in the whitewashed shacks in the in good time 1800s, and some of their descendants remained for else than 100 years after the Civil War. The last tenants abandoned the hovels about 30 years ago, and on a level they would have struggled to imagine a distant daughter of the plantation one day calling the White House home.

But a historical line be possible to be drawn from these Low Country cabins to Michelle Obama, charting an American family’session improbable journey from some side slavery, segregation, the civil-rights movement and a historic presidential election.

Their documented passage begins with Jim Robinson, Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, who was born about 1850 and lived as a slav, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling rice plantation. Records show he remained on the estate in the rear of the war, working as a sharecropper and living in the wise slave quarters by his wife, Louiser, and their children. He could neither understand nor write, according to the 1880 census.

Robinson would be the last illiterate branch of Michelle Obama’s family tree.

Census records show each people of the same age of Robinsons became to a greater degree educated than the greatest, with Michelle Obama eventually earning degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Her older brother, Craig, also earned an Ivy League education.

Barack Obama’s campaign hired genealogists to research the family’sitting roots at the onset of his presidential summon, but aides largely have kept the findings secret. Genealogists at Lowcountry Africana, a research center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, scoured documents to clown together a 120-page description, said project director Toni Carrier. She said the center signed a confidentiality agreement and is not allowed to disclose the tools and materials publicly.

However, in his now-famous speech in succession mill-race for the time of the primary, Barack Obama, whose become a father to was from Kenya, stated he was “married to a black American who carries in the inside of her the blood of slaves and slave owners.”

Obama aides refused to discuss the report or allow Michelle Obama to be interviewed about her ancestry. She has related she knew little about her family tree preceding the campaign, but census reports, property records and other historical documents show her fatherly ancestors bore witness to one of the most shameful chapters in U.S. history.

In January, when the Obamas move into the White House — a mansion built partially by slaves — as the country’s first African-American first family, Michelle Obama will embark on a life her great-great-grandfather never could have envisioned.

Living in slave shacks

Little is known about Jim Robinson’s life at the Friendfield Plantation, beyond that he worked in the riverfront rice fields after the Civil War. Local historians put on’t know how or when he came to Friendfield, but census records indicate one as well as the other his parents were born in South Carolina. The coastal Carolina incorporated town often is referred to viewed like the African-American Ellis Island because of the people slave ships that docked along its shores.

A map from the early 1870s, when Robinson was living on the plantation, shows three parallel rows of slave cabins, harvested land with 10 to 13 buildings along Slave Street. By 1911, merely 14 were standing.

Five individual cabins remain today. With their massive fireplaces and wood-plank walls, eddish. tells a story about slave life on the plantation.

The corpuscular shacks, only 19 feet deep, housed several families at once, aforesaid Ed Carter, who oversees the property. Large stone fireplaces were used for cooking and heating. Attic space beneath the gable roof offered a residence for extra people to sleep.

The plantation’s former owner, Francis Withers, built a “meeting house” towards slaves on the estate before 1841, and the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church assigned a preacher there. A fire destroyed the church in 1940.

By the time Withers died in 1847, the family had expanded Friendfield to include six plantations and more than 500 slaves. At the height of the rice trade, Friendfield was one of the most lucrative plantations in the area, Carter said.

In his will, Withers, educated at Harvard University, provided for the care of his slaves, including the upkeep of the church and a stipend for the preacher. He also requested his slaves exist treated with “great kindness and be fed and clothed.”

He left $10,000 to lever added slaves to work the plantation and provided monetary incentives notwithstanding his surviving relatives to keep his “Friendfield gang of slaves” as a group and not dash to pieces up families.

Respect for learning

The plantation’session prosperity faded after the Civil War, and the parents and children began selling right hand the property in 1879, according to land records. Jim Robinson, like many former slaves, continued to live steady the farm.

It’session unclear when he died, but topical historians think he is buried in an unmarked sober in a slave god’s acre that overlooks the old rice fields on the edges of Whites Creek.

Among Jim Robinson’s surviving children was Fraser Robinson, Michelle Obama’s great-grandfather. Born in 1884, he went to moil as a houseboy for a local line of ancestors before his 16th birthday. Census records show he was illiterate as a teen but had learned to understand and set down by the opportunity he had children.

As an adult, he worked as a lumber-mill laborer, shoe repairman and newspaper salesman. He registered for the select during World War I but was turned down because he had lost his left arm, military records show.

Fraser Robinson married a local woman named Rose Ella Cohen and had at least six children. Described by a family friend while an knowing man who wanted his children to be well-read, he ever brought home his extra copies of the “Palmetto Leader and Grit,” a infamous gazette that was general in rural communities across the country.

“He used to make his children read those newspapers,” said Margretta Dunmore Knox, who pacify lives in Georgetown and attended the same church as the Robinsons. “Maybe that’s in what state they became in the same manner smart.”

His eldest son, Fraser Jr., was born in 1912 and graduated from high school. Census records from 1930 discover that 18-year-old Fraser Jr. was living at home and acting at a sawmill after earning his diploma.

At the time, Georgetown, a coastal town approximately one hour’s drive north of Charleston and the state’s third-oldest city, was split along racial lines. Basic human rights that blacks had known after the Reconstruction era disappeared as the Deep South sank into the Depression and segregationist ways.

The power of “Enough”

As Georgetown’sitting economy crumbled, Fraser Jr. headed north to Chicago in search of employment. There, he met and married LaVaughn Johnson. Their son Fraser Robinson III — Michelle Obama’s father — was born in 1935.

Although they never attended college, Fraser III and his wife, Marian, made education a top priority for their two children. Both would lackey Princeton and earn postgraduate degrees from prestigious universities.

Fraser and LaVaughn Robinson lived on the South Side of Chicago for part of Michelle’s non-age, before retiring and moving south. After returning to Georgetown, the couple joined the AME Bethel Church, founded by freed slaves in 1865 and the oldest black body of christians in the city. The couple sang in the choir and built a large circle of friends, Knox said.

Michelle Obama returned to the same church in January while campaigning for her husband in the South Carolina presidential radical. Addressing a packed hearing that included at least 30 descendants of Jim Robinson, Obama talked about the need for change in the confident voice of a distant daughter of slavery.

“Things get better when thorough folks take action to make change happen from the bottom up,” she said. “Every greater historical significance in our appropriated time, it has been made by folks who related, ‘Enough,’ and they banded together to offer for consideration this country forward — and at this time is one of those times.”