Washington Post: Ancestry.com Reveals Al Sharpton's Ancestor Was Slave of Strom Thurmond Ancestor Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Washington Post, February 26, 2007:

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the prominent civil rights activist, is descended from a slave owned by relatives of the late senator and one-time segregationist Strom Thurmond, a genealogical study released Sunday reported.

"It was probably the most shocking thing of my life," Sharpton said of learning the findings, which were requested and published Sunday by the New York Daily News. He called a news conference to respond publicly to the report. "I couldn't describe to you the emotions I have had . . . everything from anger to outrage to reflection to some pride and glory."

...

Coleman Sharpton was given as a gift to Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was the late senator's great-great-grandfather, said Mike Ward, a spokesman for Ancestry.com. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

The concept that one's ancestors were legally owned by the ancestors of one's neighbors is a difficult for a lot of white people to process experientially. While it may be true that educated white people know the basic history of slavery in this country, whites tend to learn it either from a fairly academic standpoint in many cases, comparable to the way that people study quarks or integral calculus [UPDATE: or from the standpoint of the slaveowner or his revanchist latter-day apologists.]

Early colonial history involved indentured servitude for a period of years; such indentured servants were identified as "slaves" in some Colonial legal codes including that of Virginia. But this servitude did not break down by "race" or ancestry, but by social class in the British Isles. It was not chattel slavery; the "owner" did not own the servant but only a right to his labor for a period (that labor right could be sold.) Children of indentured servants did not become servants themselves, but walked free with their parents when their parents did. No "badges or incidents of slavery" followed indentured servants. The servant was considered to have received consideration for his servitude: transatlantic transport by choice, food and shelter. The ancestors of many of these indentures servants became the hardscrabble lower social class of Southern society, the class most likely to resent black freemen both before and after Emancipation, the class that supplied to the Ku Klux Klan many of its members and to segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond and segregationist religious ministers like Jerry Falwell their fiercest support.

35 years ago, Jerry Falwell preached to some of the descendants of indentured servitude that racial segregation was God's explicit will. Today, Jerry Falwell is claiming that Satan is behind Al Gore's efforts to slow down global warming. And combative civil rights activist Al Sharpton's ancestors were owned and sold by a ancestors of a notorious segregationist (who, ironically, engaged in the very illegal "race-mixing" [sic] in his own personal life that he himself labored to prohibit at all costs.)

There's more than one inconvenient truth.