Michelle Obama Read Online Free PDF

southerners had done in the decade and a half or so since the beginning of World War I. He moved north.
    This was the tail end of what's now called the Great Migration. African Americans from the southern states moved to the cities of the North, often switching from jobs in farming to work in factories. The African American population of major northern cities boomed.
    Michelle's grandfather chose Chicago, where the family would stay until Michelle and Barack moved into the White House. By the time he arrived, the African American community had already ballooned to more than five times the size it had been in 1910. It was growing at ten times the rate of the city's overall growth. About one of every five new residents was African American. A quarter of a million African Americans lived in Chicago by the time Fraser Jr. arrived.
    A lot of them were looking for work. Michelle's grandfather eventually got a job at the post office. He met and married a Chicago native, LaVaughn Johnson, whose parents had moved to the city from Mississippi many years before. Michelle's middle name comes from this grandmother.
    Fraser Jr.'s dreams of success in Chicago didn't work out as he'd hoped, probably because of the timing of his move. The Depression hit hard. Then, after World War II, another wave of African Americans moved north—what historians call the Second Great Migration. Competiton for jobs was tough. More than that, he discovered segregation and racism in Chicago too. Regulations made it unusually difficult for African American families to freely choose where to live. Fraser Jr. and his wife ended up in one of the public housing projects that were within an accepted area. This bothered Fraser. "He was a very proud man. He was proud of lineage," Michelle told the
Washington Post.
"There was a discontent about him." Her grandfather remembered his childhood in South Carolina fondly and talked about it often. After leaving his job at the post office, Fraser Jr. didn't waste time before moving south. He and Michelle's grandmother joined the same church, Bethel AME, where his family had been worshiping since before he was born. They became active in the Georgetown community.
    That's when Michelle's childhood trips to South Carolina began. Of course, she was a city girl. The loud and unfamiliar chirping of crickets kept her awake. She didn't like some of the food. But she met and came to know relatives she'd only heard about, and some she didn't know existed. She still has a lot of family in Georgetown.
OTHER BRANCHES
    Some of Michelle's southern connections haven't been discovered yet. The story of her mother's side of the family is also not as clear as the story of her father's side. That's part of the African American experience too. Slave owners broke family ties. Slaves didn't leave the trail of official documents—land purchase contracts, for example, or wills—that historians usually follow. Because in many places slaves weren't allowed to read and write, they didn't leave personal letters behind.
    For instance, not much is known yet about Michelle's great-great-grandmother, Rosa Ellen Cohen, who was Fraser Jr.'s wife. She seems to be a descendant of one of the European families who moved to Georgetown in the late 1700s. There were a few branches of a family named Cohen, a Jewish family that may have come from Portugal. A modern descendant of the Cohens, Sadie Pasha, who has researched the family for many years, says at least one Cohen in Georgetown passed along his name to mixed-race children in the early 1800s.
    Without more evidence, we can't know the exact relationship that led to this branch of Michelle's family tree. There are at least a few possibilities.
    There's a small chance that Michelle is descended from a free African American woman who worked for one of the Cohen families and came to be known by the family name. Government records from early 1800s show 930 African Americans living in Georgetown, of whom