The Times used the New York Daily News [1]shocker [1]on the DNA-based revelation that Al Sharpton's ancestors were slaves to a cousin of the late-Sen. Strom Thurmond to once [1]aga [1]in label the inflammatory racial demagogue as a "civil rights leader." Not just one, but "one of the most vocal and recognizable civil rights leaders of our time."
From Monday's Metro story by Fernanda Santos, "Sharpton Learns His Forebears Were Thurmond's Slaves [2]."
"On the eve of the Civil War, in segregated Florida, a white man died in debt at age 40, leaving his wife, Julia Thurmond Sharpton, alone to raise their four children and to honor his financial obligations.
"Determined to offer a helping hand, Mrs. Sharpton's father-in-law, a plantation owner in South Carolina, gave her a gift: four slaves, two adults and two children, who would work to pay off the money owed.
"In that transaction, the bloodlines of two emblematic figures of the next century, each representing an opposite side of America's racial divide, intersected. Mrs. Sharpton was a first cousin, twice removed, of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a longtime segregationist. And one of the slaves given to her, Coleman Sharpton, was the paternal great-grandfather of the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the most vocal and recognizable civil rights leaders of our time."
This is the same "civil rights leader" that spread the Tawana Brawley hoax and called Jews "diamond merchants" during the racial disturbance in Crown Heights. In Harlem in 1995, Sharpton cursed the white Jewish owner of Freddy's Fashion Mart as a "white interloper" in a protest that escalated when a protester entered the store, shot four employees and set the building on fire, killing seven employees.