The Presence of the Past

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Author Message   Tonya AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Tonya Post Number: 4735 Registered: 07-2006 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Thursday, March 08, 2007 - 02:46 am:        Posted on Wed, Mar. 07, 2007 Thurmond, Sharpton: Ugly, painful past still present Somewhere, the gods of irony are laughing. Can you blame them? Last week came news that ancestry.com, a genealogical Web site, had documented a startling link between two very unalike men. It turns out an ancestor of the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond once owned an ancestor of the Rev. Al Sharpton. Two icons of 20th-century racial politics - the one a strident foe of integration, the other regarded by some as a boogeyman of racial activism - linked by ownership. Somewhere, the gods are amused. Sharpton is not. He has pronounced himself torn by conflicting emotion: humiliation, anger, pride, and, above all, shock. The reaction from Thurmond's family, meanwhile, has been characterized by that curious shrug of shoulders, that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal. "I don't feel one way or the other," Thurmond's 74-year-old niece, Doris Strom Costner, told the Washington Post. "I have no comment," Paul Thurmond, the senator's youngest son, told the New York Daily News. And then there's Essie Mae Washington-Williams, product of a liaison Thurmond had with a 16-year-old black maid when he was in his 20s. She says Sharpton is guilty of "overreaction" about her father. "In spite of being a segregationist, he did many wonderful things for black people," she said. Too bad those wonderful things did not include renouncing his hateful views or publicly acknowledging his black daughter. William Faulkner was right: "The past is not dead. It's not even past." A man asked me just the other day how much longer I intend to make "excuses" for the problems of black kids. Racial oppression is in the past, he said. And I'm thinking to myself, Lord, give me strength. Surely I have not been derelict in pointing out the failures of and the need for the black community to be active and proactive in its own salvation. But if it's true that black folk have work to do, it's also true that the need for that work did not spring from nowhere but, rather, from a 350-year epoch of physical and - this is important - emotional brutalization. Of course, by this point, maybe he has stopped listening. Maybe you have, too. Mention of that 350 years tends to have that effect. Hence the ambivalence - "nervous chuckles," reported the Orlando Sentinel of a visit to Thurmond's hometown - that greeted last week's news in some quarters. Small wonder. It removed the shield of abstract. It put a face on the thing. And the danger is that if we can imagine that face, we can imagine others. Condoleezza Rice purchased as breeding stock. Oprah Winfrey raped on a nightly basis. Will Smith, his back split open by a whip. Sen. Barack Obama living with the same rights under the law, the same expectation of dignity, as a horse or a chair. We spend a lot of time running from this. But we never escape. That's the lesson of Sharpton's experience, the reason for nervous chuckles and ambivalent shrugs. It's an unwelcome reminder that some stains don't wash out, some dead things do not rest. And we live in the presence of the past. This flashback strip originally ran the week of Sept. 18, 2006. Garry Trudeau is on vacation. Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may write to him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com. His column publishes most Wednesdays and Sundays. © 2007 American News and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.aberdeennews.com http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16849184.htm   Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 8675 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Thursday, March 08, 2007 - 02:33 pm:        Essie Mae Washington-Williams: "In spite of being a segregationist, [my Dear Poppa Strom] did many wonderful things for black people" Now see (Jimbo), dat dere one of dem inh'rent dangas uhv Wites and niggras race-mixing. It makes foks CRAZY! HAHAHAHAHA!!! I know I sound like the Klan. But dayam if I could help it! HAHAHAHAHA!!!