Johnny Loves Vivian ntxe-news.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ntxe-news.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Vivian Liberto met Johnny Cash in 1951, when she was 17 and he was 19
The pair were married from 1954-66: she died in 2005, aged 71
She was born to a Sicilian-origin father and a mother of German-Irish descent
Only now has it emerged that she was black, via her great-great grandmother
Sarah Shields was born a slave to a white father and a black mother
She was granted her freedom and her whiteness , which passed to her children
In 1965 Liberto was pictured looking like a black woman, enraging his fans
White supremacists organized a boycott of his music; he sued for libel
Cash s team provided evidence of her whiteness in the multimillion dollar suit
Cash denied his first wife, Vivian, was African American during a 1965 boycott by racists sparked by a photo of them together. The questions about Vivian's ancestry were finally resolved on the PBS show, 'Finding Your Roots.'