On Oct. 4, 1965, country music star Johnny Cash was arrested near the U.S.-Mexico border after buying amphetamines and sedatives from a drug dealer in Juárez and stashing them in his guitar case. His long-suffering first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash, left their daughters in California and journeyed to El Paso to be by his side for the arraignment.
As Vivian stood with Cash in front of the federal courthouse, wrapped in a dark coat, her eyes downcast beneath her bouffant hairdo, a newspaper photographer snapped a picture. In the image, Vivian, whose father was of Sicilian heritage and whose mother was said to be of German and Irish descent, appeared to be Black.
As the image of Johnny and Vivian began appearing in publications across the country, white supremacists went wild.
Leaders of the racist National States’ Rights Party in Alabama ran a story in their newspaper “The Thunderbolt” with the headline: “Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash’s Negro Wife.”
“Money from the sale of [Cash’s] records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and negro women,” the paper warned. The story also mentioned the couple’s “mongrelized” young children, which included future country star Rosanne Cash and her younger sisters, Kathy, Cindy and Tara. The organization, which was connected to the Ku Klux Klan, then launched a fierce boycott against the famous musician that lasted over a year.
Cash’s handlers quickly launched a counterattack, filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and soliciting testimonials from relatives and friends attesting to Vivian’s racial background. They included Vivian’s designation as Caucasian on her marriage certificate and a list of the Whites-only schools she had attended.
But was Vivian’s heritage fully Western European as her relatives insisted, or was something else mixed in?
An African American passing her on the street could be forgiven for thinking Vivian was a light-skinned Black woman, with her full lips and darkish skin. Yet if it were a case of “passing” as White — something many Black Americans had done to escape discrimination throughout history — Vivian and her family seemed wholly unaware. The DNA tests that have upset conventional thinking about race had not yet been invented.
In the 2020 documentary “My Darling Vivian” about Cash and his first wife, the couple’s daughters added more detail: Back home in Casitas Springs, Calif., the death threats and vitriol had frightened Vivian to the core.
“She was scared to death that the KKK was coming for her and that Dad would be on the road,” Kathy Cash said in the documentary. “She had no idea what to do. Everyone knew where we lived.”
Night after night, Vivian stood at the living room picture window, coffee and cigarette in hand, surveilling the front yard and the driveway, a gun close by.
Were there African ancestors in Vivian Cash’s family tree? The answer would not arrive for more than half a century.
Earlier this year, the mystery of whether Vivian was descended in part from Africans was finally resolved. In a February episode of the PBS show, “Finding Your Roots,” host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy.
Vivian Cash’s maternal great-great grandmother was indeed an enslaved Black woman, Sarah Shields, whose White father in 1848 had granted her and her eight siblings their freedom and their passage into Whiteness, too. Shields married a White man — albeit illegally — and by the time Jim Crow arrived in the 1930s all of her children and their descendants were listed as White.
“That’s likely why to this day, many of her direct descendants have no idea that they have any African American ancestry,” Gates said.
At one point in the conversation, Gates asked Cash how it felt to learn that her mother’s ancestors had been enslaved? Cash bent her head and began to cry.
“It feels heartbreaking,” she said.
Rosanne’s maternal grandmother was Irene Robinson (the daughter of George Edgar Robinson and Dora Minnie Robinson). Irene was born in Texas. George was the son of Benjamin Franklin Robinson and Mattie E. Haynes. Dora was the daughter of Lafayette Carberson Robinson and Zereldia/Zeralda/Zerilda Ann Ewers.
Lafayette’s mother, Rosanne’s great-great-great-grandmother Sarah A. Shields, was born a slave, the daughter of William Bryant Shields, a white slave owner, and of his black slave. William freed Sarah in 1848, along with his eight other children, who were also born into slavery. Sarah married a white man, Anderson Robinson, in 1838, while she was still legally a slave.
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Genetics are crazy
. The other question is if these people were helping other black folk?
