This week, the NY Daily News trumpeted that the fourth generation ancestor of Al Sharpton was a slave owned by a relative of the late Senator Strom Thurmond.
Diogenes believes that the very worst aspect of America is our heritage of slavery.
Enslavement of conquered people was not invented here. Indeed, Native Americans were enslaved in the New World a hundred years before the English founded the Jamestown colony, and when the Indians were worked to death, they were replaced by others brought from Africa, where there had been a long history of enslavement.
Enslavement is such a vile crime that Diogenes, who is generally opposed to capital punishment, thinks it might be a good idea for people who hold slaves and those who trade in slaves. Most Amrericans think that The Emancipation Proclamation ended most of the slavery in the United States. That is not true: It did not have any effect in slaveholding states that were not in rebellion against The United States. The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution ended lawful slavery in this country, and mostly, it is observed. Please stay tuned for some examples of enslavement in the USA at the current time.
One aspect of the “peculiar institution” that was ignored for many years was the use of female slaves for sexual pleasure. Diogenes visited Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in 1976. It was already commonly known, at least by History geeks, that Jefferson was thought to have fathered slave children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. At that time, there was no mention of Sally Hemings in the tour. When asked, the tour guides stated that there were scurrilous rumors to that effect, but there was no evidence that it actually was the case. A few years ago, it was demonstrated very clearly that the descendants of Sally Hemings were related to Thomas Jefferson, and many believe that they are direct descendants of the President. The Civil War era diarist Mary Chestnut noted that every plantation had slave children that resembled the male (white) members of the household, a fact that was observed by everyone except on their own plantations.
Now, a genealogy service reports that Al Sharpton is the fourth generation descendant of an enslaved man who was owned by Julia Thurmond Sharpton, who was related to the one time candidate for President and full time lying hypocrite, Strom Thurmond.
Diogenes was a little boy in the 1950’s, do he does not have a memory of Thurmond’s race in 1948. Thurmond is dead now, at long last, but for most of his very long career, he was the champion of those who intended to oppress Black people. He was the incarnation of an evil that should never have existed, and must be erased from this country before we can actualize our country’s civic beliefs.
Thurmond was opposed to racial mixing, which was anathema to the Southern political elites. As late as 1969, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk had to resign a professorship at the University of Georgia when his son married a black woman in Virgina. Strom Thurmond was recorded on many occasions saying he was oppose to miscegenation ( he called it Miss- sejj –i- NAYSHUN). Thurmond railed against the “mongrelization of the white race” until black people got the vote, and started to vote in large numbers.
Strom Thurmond was lying the whole time. Before he ran for the Presidency in 1948, James Strom Thurmond was the father of a girl, the daughter of a black servant in the Thurmond household. After the Senator’s death in 2005, the daughter, Essie May Washington-Williams revealed the secret of who her father was. During his lifetime, Thurmond acknowledged his daughter, and paid for her education. After his death, Thurmond’s immediate (white) family tried to say that it was not so, until Washington-Williams’ photograph appeared in newspapers. The fact is, she looks astonishingly like her father, much closer in resemblance than Strom Thurmond’s legitimate son.
Brooklyn has an interesting history with respect to slavery. The oldest existing structure in Brooklyn, built by Colonial-era settlers, is the Lott House. In the last few years, remedial work on the Lott house uncovered slave quarters. There are people named Lott living in Brooklyn now, at least one living a few blocks from the Lott house. Historians of Brooklyn have told Diogenes that the family mostly moved from Brooklyn around 1828, when the institution of slavery was made unlawful in New York State. Before that, there were many slaves in Brooklyn: The first Census of the United States, in 1790, showed that Brooklyn was the city with the second-largest number of slaves in the United States (after Charleston SC).
Diogenes believes that the Minority Leader in the US Senate, Trent Lott, is the descendant of the slaveholders in Brooklyn. There is no evidence of this, except for the coincidence of his name, but proof is not really required for this kind of publication.
Trent Lott is now in his second term as leader of the Republicans in the Senate. A few years ago, he was supplanted as Majority Leader by Bill Frist, after some of Lott’s public statements on the subject of Strom Thurmond, actually became public. Here’s what Senator Lott had to say about Thurmond in 2002:
I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.
What in the world was Lott talking about? The problems of Black people having the right to vote? Being able to earn a good living without fear of being lynched? When he was caught – and because the speech was broadcast on C-SPAN, it is not surprising that he was caught – Lott made another statement:
My comments were not an endorsement of his positions of over 50 years ago, but of the man and his life.
Lott endorsed the man and the life of his hero, Thurmond. One wonders if Lott still endorses the life of his hero, who stood for hypocrisy more than anything else. In the course of looking up Trent Lott, Diogenes found an interesting fact about Lott’s youth.
In 1962, a fraternity at University of Mississippi was raided by federal marshals, who found 24 weapons. Trent Lott was the president of that fraternity, Sigma Nu.
Hypocrisy is a result of our history of slavery. Not all American hypocrisy can be traced back to the institution of slavery. But a good deal of it can be. The efforts of Mr. Thurmond and Mr. Lott and others to keep whites in power in the South have been very successful. There is no more institution of slavery in the United States, but so many people are attached to the ideals of the slaveholders that the USA was virtually captured by the old Confederacy between 2001 and 2007. And on the other side, there are people who explain every vile act as the result of years of slavery and racisim.
Al Sharpton, the New York politician who never was elected to any office, and who has not lived in New York State in the last 15 years, claimed in 1987 that Tawana Brawley was abducted and repeatedly raped by Steven Pagones, an Upstate NY Assistant District Attorney. When the governor, Mario Cuomo, asked the Attorney General, Robert Abrams to investigate the allegations, Al Sharpton also said that Abrams had masturbated over the photographs of the naked 15 year old Brawley. As late as 2003, Sharpton insisted that he did nothing wrong in making those unsupported allegations. He says all he did was to believe Tawana Brawley’s story.
Diogenes thinks that both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton are the spiritual descendants of Strom Thurmond. Both of them have the main characteristics of Thurmond:
Being absolutely wrong about serious subject,
Lying about the nature of their statements and beliefs,
Being intransigent about their lies.
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Slavery is not dead in the USA. Indeed, there still are several kinds of slaves in New York. Diogenes sees that he has been wordier than usual, and will address this issue in the future.
