Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who is bidding for the 2008 presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, in part on the appeal of his biracial background, recently found out his ancestors owned slaves.
As the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, Obama has seemed to embody a harmonious vision of the US' melting pot. But recent revelations have thrown up an unexpected twist in the tale.
Obama's ancestors on his white mother's side appear to have been slave owners. William Reitwiesner, an amateur genealogical researcher, has published a history of Obama's mother's family and discovered that her ancestors have a distinctly shadowy past.
Reitwiesner traced Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall, and found that he owned two slaves in Kentucky: a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man.
Reitwiesner also says that Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall, also owned a pair of slaves listed in an 1850 census record. They were a 60-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman. In fact, the Duvalls were a wealthy family whose members were descended from a major landowner, Maureen Duvall, whose estate owned at least 18 slaves in the 17th century.
The news is unlikely to be a serious political problem for Obama. Nor is he likely to be alone in finding out that his white ancestors owned slaves.
Obama's campaign team have handled the news of his family's slaving past a bit more casually and a lot less emotionally, issuing a statement saying such a family background was "representative of America."
That is certainly true. Slavery was the economic bedrock of the US economy in the South before the Civil War. It would come as no surprise that anyone tracing their family roots back to the pre-war South would find that his descendants had owned slaves.
But more edifying discoveries can come from looking at the past. Another of Obama's ancestors, his great-great-great-grandfather, fought for the Union army in the Civil War. Obama can lay claim to relatives who risked their lives to end slavery, too.
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