Black In America: The Agitator's Daughter

At four months old, when most babies are simply sitting around in diapers, Sheryll Cashin was sitting in jail. She had done nothing wrong. But she was born into an extraordinary black family where mom, dad and others risked their lives and their careers for progress.

Cashin tells her story in her new book, The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family, and she tells us about it in an interview today.

Cashin currently teaches constitutional law at Georgetown and writes about race relations, government and inequality in America. Her previous book, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, was published in 2004.

I first met Sheryll in the 1990s when we worked together in the Clinton White House and she was an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods.

But Sheryll was also a lawyer who had clerked for my favorite Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. A summa cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University, a Marshall Scholar from Oxford, and a Harvard Law School graduate, Cashin seems to have followed in the footsteps of her successful and politically active family back in Huntsville, Alabama where she was raised.

As CNN began its special "Black In America" series Wednesday night by profiling a black family with mixed roots, it seems like a good time to trace the roots of another black family through a brief conversation with Cashin, an author, law professor, mom and daughter.

Keith Boykin: What made you decide to write this book?

Sheryll Cashin: From the time I was arrested at the age of four months, along with my mother as she sat-in at a lunch counter, until the first time I entered a voting booth at age 18 and pulled the lever beside my own name, my life was shaped by the activism of my parents.

I had an incredible childhood and my parents inculcated values in me that I felt were worth sharing. Dad put his heart, soul, and most of his money into his causes.  He was a dentist by profession but agitation was his true calling. He founded a black-led third party in Alabama during the height of George Wallace's hegemony and succeeded in transforming "white supremacy" politics in the keystone state of massive resistance.

But by the time I was 18 he was broke and I had to figure out how to pay for college on my own.  As a teenager, I seethed with anger about his priorities. As I approached middle age and Dad approached his 80s, I simply wanted to understand the origins of his altruism and share my journey in a book that might motivate others.    
 
Boykin: You're a law professor at Georgetown. How did you find the time to write a personal memoir? 

Cashin: Fortunately my employer gave me a sabbatical and respected my proposal to write a book that situated my family's individual story in the arc of American race relations as worthy scholarship, even though I also wanted to write for a non-academic audience.

But more than anything, I was committed to this project and simply forced myself to work on it every day, even after my twin boys were born, even when I was "bone tired," even if I could only grab thirty minutes. Once I got started, my ancestors began to speak to me and reveal their stories. Their stories had to be told.
 
Boykin: How were you able to trace your family's history back to the 19th century?
 
Cashin: I started with the family lore about my great-grandfather - H.V. Cashin, a radical Republican legislator in Alabama during Reconstruction. I grew up hearing a mythology about him. He was born in antebellum Georgia, the child of a white Irishman and a free-mulatto woman, the story went. He was sent north to be educated and avoid the possibility of enslavement. During Reconstruction he returned south and became the architect of that effort in Alabama, according to the embellishments of subsequent generations.

I set out to find out as much as I could about "Grandpa Herschel." I exhausted the tools available on Ancestry.com, which puts an incredible array of archival documents at your fingertips - census records, Freedman's bureau documents, slave schedules, birth and death certificates.  Then I hired two professional genealogists to comb archives in Alabama, Georgia and Philadelphia.  Ultimately a DNA test confirmed my 19th century heritage.

Boykin: What was the biggest surprise you learned about your family (that you can
reveal without spoiling the book) from your research? 

Cashin: The family lore conveniently had it that the Cashin line was untainted by slavery.  The truth was that I descended not from black slaves but from white slave owners (and their apparently free colored offspring). That was quite a revelation that I had to come to terms with.

I took comfort in the fact that my great-grandfather, an educated mulatto, decided to return south and cast his lot with millions of black former slaves.  He was a "race man" in the 19th century long before that term was popularized in 20th century. He devoted his life to black political enfranchisement and uplift and my father did his best to follow that tradition. 
 
Boykin: We worked together in the White House? Did your family's activism inspire your own political involvement?

Cashin: Absolutely. In my parents' house, political activism was what mattered most. Until our family endured a dramatic reversal of economic fortune, we lived in affluence - the only black family in a tony neighborhood, a father who piloted his own private plane. As the only black dentist in my hometown, my father easily could have focused on living in comfort and accumulating wealth.

Instead he put everything he had into bringing about a second Reconstruction in Alabama.  Although my passion is not as blind as my father's, I did inherit his belief about the importance of political engagement, and living a life that helps others, especially poor black people who have a lot less than I do.    
 
Boykin: And I have to ask you this too. Given your family's background, what do you think about the possibility of Barack Obama becoming the first black president?

Cashin: Two years ago, I could not envision a black man winning the Democratic nomination, much less becoming President of the United States. Thanks to Barack Obama, now I can.

As my book underscores, America's trajectory with race is long. And as the rough and tumble of the Democratic primary, and now the general election, often reminds us, our nation's racial trajectory is not yet complete.  But Senator Obama has clearly accelerated our improving race relations.  Beyond Obama ultimately ascending to the most powerful position on earth, and I think he will, in my view what is most important about his candidacy is that generations of black children may begin to see the world as a place without limits for them.