Powerful stuff about an awful period of ours, or anyones, history. Al Sharpton, in today's Los Angeles Times, relates his feelings on his finding out that his forefathers were enslaved and owned by the family of the late Strom Thurmond, a United States Senator who was a fierce segregationist.
Despite the burning knowledge of the subjegation that was forced on way too many members of one specific race from another, Sharpton realizes that .....rage will do no good for Coleman Sharpton's descendants or the Thurmond descendants. My family and the Thurmond family must rise above the ugly, shameful past that binds us, just as America must come out of denial and seek to repair the damage that slavery has done and to eliminate the bigotry that still lingers.
Not an easy conclusion to arrive at, even harder to implement fully without the realization of the utterly dehumanizing idea of slavery, and the natural seeds of anger and distrust that such actions have set upon all of mankind. Is this what our God had in mind for all of us? The wheels of enlightenment are obviously turning way too slowly to right the wrongs of the past.
STORY
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