“It feels heartbreaking,” Rosanne Cash admitted through tears after finding out that an ancestor of her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash — the first wife of singer-songwriter Johnny Cash, who both received threats from the KKK — was enslaved. This ancestor was Vivian’s maternal great-great grandmother, a Black woman named Sarah Shields, whom Rosanne learned about for the first time ever during an episode of the PBS show Finding Your Roots that aired in Feb. 2021. At the time, only Vivian’s European background had been known, and this discovery in her ancestry resurfaced thanks to a profile on Johnny’s first wife in The Washington Post on May 16.
Before the PBS episode, the world only knew that Vivian was reported to be of Sicilian heritage on her dad’s side, and German/Irish on her mother’s side. However, in the ’60s amid the Civil Rights Movement, Vivian had been the target of attention from white supremacists since they believed she looked Black. “My dad got into a public battle with the KKK and so I knew about that, and it was scary,” Rosanne said during the PBS special. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white.
Henry’s research also led him to discover a census from 1870, which revealed that Rosanne’s great-great grandfather — a man named Lafayette Robsinson — was “mixed-race.” Upon learning this, Rosanne recalled the long-running rumors of her mother’s background and said, “So, it was, at least, a small part true.”
