The Ties That Bind

So, what do Al Sharpton and Strom Thurmond have in common besides a history of race baiting and being blow hards?

Well, you would be surprised. Al Sharpton certainly was. Someone did some research that appears to show that someone way back in Strom's family owned Sharpton's relatives as slaves.

In a series of numbing revelations, Sharpton learned how:

# His great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave in South Carolina.

# Coleman Sharpton, a woman and two children - believed by genealogists to be his wife and kids - were given as a gift to Julia Thurmond, and were forced to move to Florida.

# Julia Thurmond's grandfather is Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather.

# Once freed, Coleman Sharpton earned a living as an elderly wood hauler, and fathered a son, Coleman Jr., who would go on to be a minister - like his grandson, the Rev. Al.

The enormity of the political and social irony was not lost of Sharpton, as the epic story of his family was laid out before him.

"I have always wondered what was the background of my family," he said. "But nothing - nothing - could prepare me for this."

For the better part of two weeks, a team of genealogists - led by Megan Smolenyak, an ancestry scholar who has written four books and was the lead researcher for the PBS "Ancestors" series - unpeeled the layers of Sharpton's family tree.

They unearthed historic documents, including an 1861 slave contract that confirmed that Coleman Sharpton was indeed sent from Edgefield County, S.C., to Liberty County, Fla., where he would work until given his freedom at the end of the Civil War.

So what exactly does all this mean? Well, all this happened over 140 years ago and why should the sins of the father (or the great great great great great grandfather?) inure on the son. At what point do we have to say that this is a historical fact, but nothing more.