Sent: Sun 3/4/2007 4:05 AM
To: Gregg, Perry
Subject: Sharpton's Ancestry, etc.
Perry,
Last week Rev. Al Sharpton discovered that his great-grandfather was a slave owned by family members of the late ultra-conservative Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Certainly this is ironic because of the extreme political differences between the two men. It is also historically instructive as an example of the temporal proximity of slavery. Rev. Sharpton remembers conversations with his grandfather about his great-grandfather.
Much of the research done for Rev. Al was in the U. S. Census records and it reminded me of similar work done on my mother's family in 2006 by a Utah genealogist. After we shared our mother's and grandmother's maiden names and birthplaces, the researcher quickly traced our ancestry back to the 1870 Census where she found a 65 year-old great-great-grandfather in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. He was a blacksmith and was born in Tennessee in 1805. His granddaughter (my maternal grandmother) lived 94 years. Her last fifteen years were my first fifteen and she lived with us 'til the end.
These similarities "connected" me with Bob Herbert's piece "Slavery Is Not Dead. It's Not Even Past" in the March 1, 2007 New York Times and I wrote a letter (see below) that is published in today's paper.
Best regards,
David
Slavery's Legacy, Neverending
To the Editor:
Re "Slavery Is Not Dead. It's Not Even Past," by Bob Herbert (column, March 1):
The closeness through direct ancestry of the Rev. Al Sharpton (and me) to slavery blesses and curses us simultaneously. His being a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2004 as the great-grandson of a slave is an example of that contrast.
It seems counterintuitive that a country less than a half-century removed from widespread Jim Crow could have chosen black Supreme Court justices, secretaries of state, presidential cabinet members, governors, members of Congress and so on. The "curse" of this is that many young people can't accept that such a great nation was ever so cruel or that the tentacles of slavery and Jim Crow extend into our own time.
David L. Evans
Cambridge, Mass., March 1, 2007