The late country music icon Johnny Cash's daughter, Rosanne Cash, stunned after DNA test reveals her mother, Vivian Liberto, was Black...
From The Daily Mail
Johnny Cash's first wife was black and her great-great grandmother a slave, it has emerged - shocking the Cash family, and providing a dramatic posthumous twist to her remarkable story.
Vivian Liberto died in 2005 at the age of 71, believing she was of mixed Italian and German ancestry.
The daughter of a father of Sicilian heritage and a mother of German and Irish descent, she was married to Cash from 1954-66.
In 1965, when Cash was arrested on drug offenses, Liberto appeared in court in El Paso to support him and a photograph seemed to show her as black - enraging white supremacists at the time.
Mixed-race marriages were illegal until 1967, and it would be considered anathema, particularly in the South, for years to come.
Cash and Liberto sued newspapers who referred to her as black, and produced evidence of her white upbringing and education.
Yet modern techniques have finally confirmed that Liberto was indeed African American, and her great-great grandmother was born a slave.
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.
Rosanne Cash, 65, the eldest of four daughters born to Johnny and Vivian, was left shocked by the results.
