Liberal Talk Radio

This is better than a film script:

Reeling from the news that his great-grandfather was once enslaved to the family of Strom Thurmond, the Rev. Al Sharpton said yesterday he wants a DNA test to learn whether he and the segregationist senator share a bloodline.

“I’ll do it,” said Sharpton. “I can’t find out anything more shocking than I’ve already learned.”

. . .

Sharpton’s great-grandfather Coleman Sharpton Sr. was owned by a white woman named Julia Ann Thurmond shortly before the Civil War, according to an 1861 slave contract uncovered by Ancestry.com at The News’ request.

Her grandfather was the great-great-grandfather of Sen. Thurmond, who came to symbolize Southern white resistance to integration.

. . .

Sharpton broke the news Saturday night to his father, to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and to the daughters of late singer James Brown. Jackson and Brown were Sharpton’s mentors - and both grew up within 60 miles of where his great-grandfather was a slave.

“I told [Brown's] daughters last night about this, and we all wondered whether some of James Brown’s family might have been slaves with my [great] grandfather,” Sharpton said.

Sharpton, who has not spoken with Thurmond’s family, said he met Thurmond just once, when Brown introduced them in Washington in 1991, after Thurmond had refused to intervene when Brown was jailed.

And spruce up your third act with this:

She is white and related to a U.S. senator who championed segregation.

She also shares the surname of a prominent black civil rights leader - not because of any blood connection but because of her family’s long-ago ties to the slave trade of the South.

Sharon Sharpton Hyatt, a 61-year-old widow who lives in a ranch house along a dirt road in this rural section of Jackson County, was unaware of the connections until the News contacted her.

. . .

The genealogy experts also determined that Hyatt shares her maiden name, Sharpton, with the Rev. Al Sharpton because her great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Sharpton, was the son of Julia Thurmond, whose family enslaved the reverend’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, in the 1860s.

“Oh my God, that’s horrible,” Hyatt exclaimed. “I’m from the South, but slavery is something I would never condone. If I had lived back then, I would not have approved. I’d be ashamed of it. The concept of owning anyone is awful.”