Eugene Robinson: Al Sharpton's Stunning Reminder
If you think about it, there should be nothing particularly surprising about the discovery that one of Strom Thurmond's relatives once owned the Rev. Al Sharpton's great-grandfather. That's how slavery worked -- human beings owning other human beings, buying them and selling them, often passing them down to the next generation like sentient family heirlooms. Haven't we already hashed and rehashed that whole sad story?
Actually, no.
What makes the story that broke over the weekend so compelling is that we know the charismatic activist Sharpton and we knew the onetime segregationist Thurmond. The ancestors of such public figures can't be dismissed as mere historical abstractions. They were real, flesh-and-blood men and women who played their roles, voluntarily or not, in the horrific institution that so indelibly stained this nation.
Because we know so little about slavery at the individual level, we really don't know slavery at all.
"I almost fell off the chair," Sharpton told me by phone yesterday, describing the moment when a team of expert genealogists, working with the New York Daily News for a Black History Month project, met him at the studio where he does his radio talk show and told him of his link with Thurmond.
As Sharpton tells it, the researchers had just informed him that his great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton Sr., once lived near Edgefield, S.C. Previously, he had never been able to trace that side of his family back further than the grocery store his grandfather Coleman Sharpton Jr. had owned and run in Florida. Sharpton said he thought he knew where the genealogists were headed -- Sharpton once was entertainer James Brown's road manager, and Brown was from near Edgefield, so Sharpton thought he was about to be told that he and the late Godfather of Soul were related.
"I thought I had it all figured out while they were talking, and I was getting my reaction ready," Sharpton recalled. When the researchers from the Web site Ancestry.com dropped the Thurmond bomb, the normally voluble Sharpton could only take stock in disbelief: "Strom Thurmond's family owned my family," he said, according to the Daily News....
Read entire article at WaPo
Actually, no.
What makes the story that broke over the weekend so compelling is that we know the charismatic activist Sharpton and we knew the onetime segregationist Thurmond. The ancestors of such public figures can't be dismissed as mere historical abstractions. They were real, flesh-and-blood men and women who played their roles, voluntarily or not, in the horrific institution that so indelibly stained this nation.
Because we know so little about slavery at the individual level, we really don't know slavery at all.
"I almost fell off the chair," Sharpton told me by phone yesterday, describing the moment when a team of expert genealogists, working with the New York Daily News for a Black History Month project, met him at the studio where he does his radio talk show and told him of his link with Thurmond.
As Sharpton tells it, the researchers had just informed him that his great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton Sr., once lived near Edgefield, S.C. Previously, he had never been able to trace that side of his family back further than the grocery store his grandfather Coleman Sharpton Jr. had owned and run in Florida. Sharpton said he thought he knew where the genealogists were headed -- Sharpton once was entertainer James Brown's road manager, and Brown was from near Edgefield, so Sharpton thought he was about to be told that he and the late Godfather of Soul were related.
"I thought I had it all figured out while they were talking, and I was getting my reaction ready," Sharpton recalled. When the researchers from the Web site Ancestry.com dropped the Thurmond bomb, the normally voluble Sharpton could only take stock in disbelief: "Strom Thurmond's family owned my family," he said, according to the Daily News....