Ashley Swain was standing in a room, about to learn something that would rearrange her sense of who she was, when her mind went somewhere unexpected: a dorm room at Spelman College, the night Barack Obama was elected president.
“I’m going back to the moment when President Obama was first elected. I was an undergraduate at Spelman College,” Swain told “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts. “And to know that I’m a descendant of someone who helped build the White House where the first Black African American president was — gives me goosebumps and is, like, something I would’ve never thought or imagined.”
The moment is the emotional center of American Story: The Hands That Built the White House, an exclusive Robin Roberts report that “Good Morning America” will preview as part “Disney Celebrates America,” a 24-hour multiplatform special marking the country’s 250th anniversary. In it, Roberts sits down with Swain and her mother, Jackie Smith Sullivan — the first confirmed living descendants ever identified of an enslaved person who helped construct the White House.
It is, organizers say, a first of its kind: no other genealogical organization is known to have completed this kind of research and confirmed a direct family line back to one of the enslaved laborers who built the presidential mansion.
Enslaved Black Americans helped build the White House is, by now, a widely documented historical fact. What has remained elusive for generations is the ability to trace that fact forward into the present: to find actual people alive today who can say, with documented certainty, this was my ancestor.
That is the gap the 10 Million Names Project was built to close. Run by American Ancestors, formerly known as the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the oldest and largest national genealogical organization in the country, the project is dedicated to recovering the names of the roughly 10 million people enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America — names too often erased from ledgers, bills of sale and family memory alike.
Working with researchers from the project, ABC News traced a line of descent that had gone unclaimed for generations: Sullivan learned that her third great-grandfather helped build the White House. Her daughter, Swain, learned the same laborer was her fourth great-grandfather.
The discovery reached two women living very different lives in very different cities. Sullivan lives in Philadelphia. Swain, married and the mother of three boys, lives in Atlanta and holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Neither had any reason to suspect their family tree ran directly into the foundation of the White House — until historians, genealogists and what producers describe as groundbreaking ancestry research brought the line into focus.
For Roberts, who has spent her career sitting across from people at the exact moment their lives change, the assignment carried personal weight.
“Ashley and Jackie’s story reminds us that history is not just found in books, it lives on through people, families and the truths we continue to uncover,” Roberts said. “As part of ‘Disney Celebrates America,’ it was my honor — in collaboration with the 10 Million Names project — to help tell this family’s deeply moving American story.”
The resulting report leans into that idea deliberately. Rather than treating the discovery as a historical footnote, the special follows Sullivan and Swain through the process of learning it — the records, the researchers, the moment the connection is confirmed — and lets their reactions carry the story. It is, in that sense, less a history lesson than a reunion: two women meeting an ancestor they never knew they had, more than two centuries later.
The report sits inside a broadcast built around the sweep of American history — its landmarks, its landscapes, its founding documents — but it insists on making room for a harder, quieter thread: the people whose labor built the country’s most symbolic buildings without their names ever being written down. As the project’s framing puts it, the goal is a story that confronts the painful contradictions at the heart of the American story while also celebrating the resilience, strength and enduring contributions of Black Americans.
For Swain and Sullivan, the timing lands with a certain symmetry — a family’s long-buried history surfacing in the same week the nation marks 250 years of its own. Somewhere in that overlap is the point of the whole project: that the story of how America was built was never only written in the founding documents. Some of it had to be found.
“Disney Celebrates America,” the network’s 24-hour multiplatform event commemorating the country’s 250th anniversary. The broadcast begins Friday, July 3, at 10:00 p.m. EDT and continues through Saturday, July 4, across ABC, ABC News, ESPN, National Geographic, Disney+, Hulu, FX, Freeform and ABC’s owned television stations and affiliates.
A first look at American Story: The Hands That Built the White House with Robin Roberts airs during a special Fourth of July edition of “Good Morning America,” live from 7 to 9 a.m. ET on July 4.
Viewers who want the complete story will have to wait two more days: the full 30-minute special streams Monday, July 6, at 8:30 p.m. ET, on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu.
Watch a preview below.
