Vivian Cash
She, her brother Raymond Alvin and sister Sylvia were the children of Irene (née Robinson), a homemaker, and Thomas Peter Liberto, an insurance salesman and amateur magician.
[3] On July 18, 1951, 17-year-old Vivian met Johnny Cash, an Air Force recruit in basic training, at a roller skating rink in San Antonio, Texas.
After his rapid success, Cash moved Vivian and their family to Hollywood, where he pursued film roles and entertainment industry connections when he wasn't on tour.
[3] In 1965 Vivian's husband, Johnny Cash, was arrested in Texas for possession of hundreds of amphetamine pills and bringing drugs into the United States across the Mexican border.
Though the couple had been estranged for three years, Vivian flew to El Paso, Texas to accompany Cash to his court hearing.
[7] A widely circulated black and white photograph of them leaving the courthouse brought Vivian Cash to public notice for the first time.
They were unhappy about his criticism of the United States' treatment of Native Americans[3][9] and his association with Bob Dylan and other counterculture figures.
Flyers were distributed at Johnny Cash's concerts urging people to call a phone number that played a reading of the Thunderbolt article; a voice intoned, "the race mixers of this country continue to sell records to your teenage children.
[3] Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash's manager, met with Robert Shelton, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and threatened a $200,000 lawsuit for harassment.
Holiff also contacted national and local newspapers to correct the story; his efforts included a well-received article in the New York Post.
Specialists noted Vivian's designation as White on her marriage certificate in Texas, a list of the Whites-only schools she had attended in the segregated state, and letters from close associates attesting to their knowledge of her identity.
Liberto later said that she had filed for divorce in 1966 because of Cash's severe abuse of alcohol and other drugs, as well as his constant touring and his repeated acts of adultery with other women.
In 2002, Vivian was approached by freelance writer and producer Ann Sharpsteen about appearing in a retrospective program about Johnny Cash for VH1.
[5] In February 2021, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the show Finding Your Roots, featured Rosanne Cash as a guest.
They also found that one of her four maternal great-great-great-grandmothers[clarification needed] was Sally Shields, a woman of mixed race who was born into slavery in Alabama.
Sally's white father and master was William Bryant Shields, a planter born in North Carolina and the son of an Irish immigrant.
[18] The legislature's act was conditional, stipulating that the Shields's children's 'freedom' was “confined as to residence to the counties of Perry, Dallas and Wilcox.”[18] Further, it precluded them from being able to inherit land.
[18] Originally living near each other in Perry County, most of the grown children of the extended William B. Shields family left Alabama and migrated to Texas, where they were less identifiable as being of mixed race because they were among people who did not know their backgrounds.
To avoid being drafted into the Confederacy, the Robinson family and other Shields siblings migrated during the Civil War to Mexico for a time.
[18] According to her official biographer Ann Sharpsteen, and her own words in her 2007 memoir, Vivian Cash strongly identified throughout her life as a white Sicilian American.
