“I couldn’t describe the emotions that I’ve had over the last two or three days thinking about this,” the civil rights leader said in a solemn address to reporters at a news conference. “Everything from anger and outrage to reflection, and to some pride and glory.”

Sharpton found out about the connection to Thurmond last week after the New York Daily News got his approval to work with genealogists to trace his ancestry.

Researchers from ancestry.com traced Sharpton’s roots using a database with access to 5 billion records, including birth and death certificates, slave narratives, census and bank records and United States Colored Troops documents. They discovered that Sharpton’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond’s great-great grandfather.

“I know there’s no such thing as a boring family tree,” said Megan Smolenyak, chief family historian for ancestry.com, who presented the findings to Sharpton on Thursday. “I knew we would find something, but I certainly didn’t anticipate this.”

The information also showed that Sharpton’s great-grandfather had been freed. Smolenyak said Sharpton was stunned when she told him about his family tree.

“It’s one thing to know or suspect perhaps your ancestors were slaves,” she said, “but it makes it much more real when you hear names and find out how they were related to you.”

In a phone interview Sunday, Sharpton said he had one “awkward” encounter with the South Carolina senator in 1991 during a visit to Washington in which the two men barely spoke. Sharpton said he had not yet decided whether he would meet with Thurmond’s relatives.

A niece of Thurmond’s, Ellen Senter, 61, of Columbia, S.C., confirmed that she had told the Daily News she would speak to Sharpton if he wanted to talk, but she declined to offer any more comments.

Thurmond, who died in 2003 at age 100, was the longest-serving senator in the United States. A Dixiecrat-turned-Democrat-turned Republican, he fiercely resisted integration and was known for his opposition to the growing civil-rights movement in the late 1940s.

He once declared: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our schools, our churches, our swimming pools and our theaters.”

But his political stance mellowed as he grew older.

Sharpton said he found it ironic that Thurmond “ran for president as the segregationist candidate in 1948, and I’m the great-grandson of a slave who ran for president on a civil-rights platform.”

Sharpton, who ran for president in 2004, once compared Thurmond’s secret that he had a half-black daughter to the Democratic Party’s relationship with black voters — claiming both had been kept “in the background.”

Thurmond’s family has acknowledged that he fathered a biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whose mother was a housekeeper in his parents’ home.

Sharpton became active in the movement in the late 1960s, when he was appointed by Jesse Jackson to help black people receive better job opportunities. He has since become a national figure seeking racial and social justice, speaking out on issues such police brutality.

In 2002, Sharpton called for the resignation of former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, who said at the time that his state of Mississippi was proud to have voted for Thurmond in 1948.

“If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either,” Lott said.

Lott later apologized for his statement.

Sharpton said the recent news brought back memories of his protests against Lott, who later resigned, as well as conversations he had over the years with civil-rights leaders such as Jackson about the man with whom they disagreed over issues of segregation.

“Thurmond,” Sharpton said, “was always the symbol of what we detested.”

Sharpton said his connection to Thurmond “makes me feel my destiny was to fight for civil rights, and do what my great-grandfather wanted me to do.”

Subscribe to The China Post and save.  Click hereSharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Enter your comments - 800 characters max

Receive China Post promos

Respond to this email