fayfreethinkers.com

NEW YORK — The Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond _ a discovery the civil rights activist called "shocking" on Sunday.

Sharpton learned of his connection to Thurmond, once a prominent defender of segregation, last week through the Daily News, which asked genealogists to trace his roots.



"It was probably the most shocking thing in my life," Sharpton said at a news conference Sunday, the same day the tabloid revealed the story.

Some of Thurmond's relatives said the nexus also came as a surprise to them. Doris Strom Costner, a distant cousin who said she knew the late senator all her life, said Sunday she "never heard of such a thing."

The revelations surfaced after Ancestry.com contacted a Daily News reporter who agreed to have his own family tree done. The intrigued reporter then turned around and asked Sharpton if he wanted to participate. Sharpton said he told the paper, "Go for it."

The genealogists, who were not paid by the newspaper, uncovered the ancestral ties using a variety of documents that included census, marriage and death records.

They found that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

See the rest here.

DAR
Geez, did they dig Strom up for that picture?

Just think, if we didn't have federalism and constitutional enforcement, we could still have pockets of overt slavery going on in the US today.

D.

Columbus' fallacy. In fact, slavery was economically irrational and on its way out even before the Civil War. As de Tocqueville reported from extensive interviews ("Democracy in America"), even the southern slave-owners realized that slavery's days were numbered. Centralization simply caused massive death and destruction to end something already on the way out. And killed Jeffersonianism, resulting in a high-plunder empire.

Point of nomenclature: Federalism is opposed to centralization. The War of Northern Aggression was not federalist, but centralist. Lincoln's war was a war for forced unification, against federalism.

federalism
n : the idea of a federal organization of more or less
self-governing units

Self-governing units may seceed, I might add.

Hogeye wrote:slavery was economically irrational and on its way out even before the Civil War... even the southern slave-owners realized that slavery's days were numbered.

DAR
I know this is an important even essential doctrine preached by the Rothbard/Lew group of loonies but I don't think it is taken very seriously outside that group.
"On it's way out" is rather vague to say the least. I think the days are number on the "War on Drug's" and the continuing oppression and subclass status for gays, but this doesn't tell you anything about how much longer it will go on. I prefer for it to end much sooner than much later. I think slavery in the south would have went on for a very long time as well. Enough was enough. I also think with local control and your fantasy of anarchy, we would have all sorts of atrocities reassert themselves in the US, including Jim Crow garbage etc. Along with all of the other problems as well of course.

D.

Slavery depends on the type of crops grown. Slavery was declining in popularity as the tobacco industry was slowing down (yes, slowing down - in the colonial days, tobacco was so "valuable" it was used as money - colonial farmers/plantation owners paid their taxes and tithes in tobacco, purchased the next year's supplies, bought slaves - and wives - with tobacco) and then the cotton gin was invented. Cotton was so hard to separate manually, it wasn't a cost-effective crop and the experimental replacement of cotton for tobacco was considered a failure (back to hemp!) when the mechanical separator was invented. That kicked cotton up to "King" status and revitalized the slave trade.