I read an article in today's paper highlighting Al Sharpton's ancestors were once owned by the Thurmond family. Check this out at:
Sharpton wants DNA Testing
Sharpton's link to the Thurmonds
None of this surprise me as a Black woman, given that the Thurmonds were slaveowners, landowners, and segregationists. We cannot escape our past no matter what people say. We are tied in more ways than one. It's time for America to acknowledge the past connection so that we can move forward.
With all of the sexual abuse/rape/sexual coercion that was done by white men (slavemaster, overseer, white men who came to the plantation, etc.), no telling what white families many black families are related to.
ReplyDelete""It was probably the most shocking thing in my life," Sharpton said at a news conference Sunday, the day the Daily News reported the link.
I would think it would have been the most stomach-turning thing to discover that he was related to someone like Thurmond, a man who took advantage of a young 15-year-old black girl who had no control over the actions of a 23-year-old white man.
A man whose segregated racist/sexist society said it was okay to use a young black girl as if she was a sexual toilet.
And the fact that Thurmond denied his biracial daughter Essie's existence, publically, showed his hypocrisy in the most blatant way.
Lay down with the mother, get her pregnant, then deny to the world, his own flesh and blood.
"His children have confirmed that he fathered a biracial daughter. Essie Mae Washington-Williams' mother was a housekeeper in the home of Thurmond's parents."
Oh. It's only true if the white family confirms that it is true, nevermind what Essie said of Thurmond being her father. She's just one of many black children fathered by white men during segregation, children whose fathers publically denied many black women, but, privately, layed up with black women undercover of the night.
"Some of Thurmond's relatives said the nexus also came as a surprise to them. A niece, Ellen Senter, said she would speak with Sharpton if he were interested.
"I doubt you can find many native South Carolinians today whose family, if you traced them back far enough, didn't own slaves," Senter, of Columbia, S.C., told the Daily News."
Of course.
It was not just only the white slavemaster and white overseer.
It was many white men after slavery, during segregation, who could not wait to lay up with a black woman.
After seeing the slavemaster have forced sex with black women and girls for over 350 years, many poor white men who could not own slaves, finally saw their chance to do to black women what the slavemaster and his male relatives were doing for so long.
And no longer would the poor white man be jealous of the rich planter class anymore.
With the abolition of slavery, and the institution of the reign of Jim Crow segregation terror, poor white men were finally able to declare their open season on black women, and in the end, like the white slavemeaster, pour their genes/bloodline, into the black race, via the rape and sexual coercion of black women.
No telling how many white people living today that are related to black Americans because of the legacy of slavery and segregation.
No telling whose brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews we have in common with white America.
This dirty little secret of America's sexual warfare that white America has waged against black America has never been a secret to black America.
It has been a reality for many black families across the South.
Rare was the black family that escaped this degredation.
And what has been reality to black America for generations, is only now becoming reality for white America.
"Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out."