Not only do we have Mitt Romney, a practicing Mormon, with polygamous forefathers (who woulda thunk it?), and the six degrees of separation moment when we discovered that a forefather of Strom Thurmond owned a forefather of Al Sharpton, now we have a new shocker.
Genealogists have uncovered a new ingredient in the melting pot identity of Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who hopes to become the first black president. His white maternal ancestors once owned slaves.
Mr. Obama is the American-born son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. The genealogists, led by William Addams Reitwiesner, studied the family history of Mr. Obama’s mother and determined that Mr. Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves listed in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky.
Mr. Obama’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Mary Duval, also owned two slaves, the records show.
Isn't that a pretty tenuous tie? You have to go back seven generations to find slave holders in Obama's family. Does the fact that Obama's relatives owned slaves 155 years ago have any relevance to, well, anything?
Other than a renewed interest in finding one's family skeletons before the New York Times does, I can't think of any reason for this mad scramble to find dirt on the forefathers of present day presidential candidates (and notable figures). Slavery has been outlawed for 142 years. At some point, we've got to give current people a break from the curse of it. Even the Bible had a limit on how many generations a curse lasted.
Virtually all Americans, regardless of their race or ethnicity, have ancestors who owned slaves. Many African Americans who researched their family trees would be shocked to discover that have black as well as white ancestors who were slave owners. In the United States, free blacks as well as whites owned slaves (one of the South’s biggest slave owner was a freed black man notorious for his harsh treatment of his slaves). The percentage of free blacks who owned slaves was small, as was the percentages of whites who owned slaves, but the intricacies of the genetic pool guarantee that virtually everyone is related to them. African Americans who traced their heritage back to Africa would discover that virtually all their African ancestors were involved in the slave traded. The African tribes ran the “supply side” of the Atlantic slave trade. The ancestors of Hispanic Americans owned both black and Indian slaves. American Indian tribes practiced slavery both before and after the European discovery of America. The Cherokee Nation, for example, recently voted overwhelmingly to revoke the tribal citizenship of about 2,800 descendants of Cherokee slaves.
ReplyDeleteThat was the point I was trying to make. Slavery was so pervasive in American society that if your family tree goes back beyond the middle of the 20th Century, you probably have some slave/slave-owning ancestors.
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