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Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke recently made a passionate speech at a meeting with the Gullah-Geechee Nation, an organization of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in plantations ranging from Florida to South Carolina.
The Beaufort speech followed the question of one of the participants as to whether O'Rourke was in favor of reparations or the idea of compensating the descendants of slaves.
"Yes," he replied. "We have to repair this country since its very foundation: to kidnap West Africans, enslave them to literally build the wealth of the United States" and not to allow African Americans to "share the fruits" of labor of their ancestors.
O 'Rourke said: "Today, white America does not know this story." A path to repair, he said, will only come "through storytelling, learning, and sharing this American story." with everyone".
However, O'Rourke has never publicly shared the story of some members of his family belonging to slaves.
O'Rourke is listed as a member on Ancestry.com, where there is extensive literature on the slaves of his ancestors, his wife Amy and his wife, and their support for Confederation. However, in his writings and media interviews, O'Rourke spoke only of parents who lived too late for fighting for the south in the American Civil War or for masters of slavery.
In an interview, O'Rourke said he and his wife knew nothing of their ancestral ties to the Confederation and the detention of slaves until the Guardian contacted him. Amy O'Rourke refused to be interviewed.
Rose and Eliza
O'Rourke often talks about the Irish roots of his father, the late Patrick Frances "Pat" O'Rourke, of Irish immigrant descent. One of Pat's great-grandfathers, Bernard "Barney" O'Rourke, immigrated from Ireland, apparently in the 1860s. He lived in the Midwest, worked in the railways and had no ties with the south antenna.
O'Rourke also paid tribute to his great-grandmother, a Welsh immigrant, who arrived in the United States in the early 20th century.
O'Rourke said he visited Ancestry.com about once a year, but had never looked for relatives other than those on his father's Irish side. O'Rourke explained that it would have taken "time that I do not have".
But one of her grandmothers, Mildred Jasper O'Rourke, came from an old family in the south. His great-grandfather, Andrew Cowan Jasper, lived in Kentucky in the early 19th century. The Federal Slave Census of 1850 indicates that it has two young women, one 22-year-old and the other 17-year-old, who identified during the period the names of their owners, but only the sex and age of the enslaved people.
In 1856, Andrew Jasper left Kentucky for Kansas, with his family and enslaved women. He died a year later and his estate was controlled. The enslaved women, who were then 27 and 23 years old, were identified in the estate papers as Rose and Eliza.
The executor of the estate hired an appraiser who paid $ 800 to Rose and Eliza. The two were then hired and the executor spent $ 5.05 to buy them work clothes. Over the next few weeks, slave women reported $ 29.58 to Jasper's widow and children. In calculating the 60 hours of weekly work that they probably worked, it is about $ 4,000 in today's dollars.
The executor organized a "crying sale", known today as the auction. Among the liquidated items were plows, horses, cows, calves, rifles, a millstone – and Rose and Eliza.
O 'Rourke said that he was moved to learn that the two women that Jasper had enslaved.
"Amy and I sat down and talked about it," O'Rourke said. "How could Andrew, through his descendants, convey the benefits of owning other human beings? And finally, my children and I benefit. "
The achievement has deeply affected him, he said, adding, "I do not know if I have the words to say it." O & # 39; Rourke then explained this in an article about Medium, writing: "We all need to know our own story related to national history, just like I learn mine. "
Peter, Darsy, Sally, Ned and Moses
O'Rourke also has ancestors from the South before the maternal side. His mother is Melissa Williams O'Rourke and Melissa's father – O'Rourke's grandfather – was Robert Lee Williams Jr., named Beto.
The family was from Georgia and Robert Lee Williams' grandfather – Beto's great-great-grandfather – was Columbus Marion Williams. Columbus joined the Confederate forces at the age of 16, alongside his father, Frederick Samuel Williams, 44.
O'Rourke's wife, Amy Sanders O'Rourke, also has roots in Confederation and slavery. Before her marriage, her great-grandmother, Margaret Fieulle, was nicknamed Levy; his grandfather was Richard B Levy. Richard belonged to a family of Presbyterians, many of whom became Episcopalians after the Civil War.
The Levys were growers in Tidewater, Virginia, from the 18th century. An online registration, dating back to 1798, commemorates a dispute between the extended family over who inherited from several slaves: "a black man named Peter," "a boy named Darsy," "a girl called Sally ", a" black man called Ned "and" another called Moses ".
Richard B Levy fought for Confederation and was with Robert E. Lee during his surrender at Appomattox in 1865. A few years later, Richard moved to Longview, Texas – a city that will undergo five lynchings between 1888 and 1919 and a blank race. riot that ended with the dark side of the city burned.
At the time of Jim Crow, the United Daughters of Confederation founded a chapter at Longview and named it after Richard B Levy. The mission of the UDC was to preserve the eulogistic ideas on the southern antenna, including Confederation and slavery, among future generations of whites.
To this end, the UDC has distributed to school libraries books that justified the white supremacism and erected many commemorative monuments in the south of the country. In 1911, Richard B Levy's chapter placed a statue of a Confederate soldier in downtown Longview. Thousands of people attended the unveiling and, according to historical testimonies, were moved with joy when "Dixie" was sung. Margaret Levy removed the canvas from the statue.
More than a century later, it still exists in Longview. The chapter Richard B Levy UDC is still listed with the IRS as a non-profit organization.
Countless Americans could share similar family stories, if they knew them. Nearly 2 million whites in the south of Antebellum owned 4 million slaves. Today, the number of descendants of slave owners is in the tens of millions, encompassing people living all over America, with political trends ranging from right to left.
But few whites have explored this uncomfortable side of their genealogy: they "especially want to get away from it," said Thomas deWolf, who heads the organization Come to the Table. He encourages explorations of genealogy and interracial communication among the descendants of enslaved white and Afro-American slaves.
DeWolf, who is white, is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Family in the North confronts its legacy as the largest slave dynasty in US history. The book is dedicated to his ancestors from Rhode Island, who brought thousands of slaves to the Caribbean and South America from West Africa.
"Most people think that" repairs "means" writing checks "to people who live today, who have never been enslaved, DeWolf said, but, he noted, the word is rooted in "repair".
To come to the table, the reparation of America's slave past includes whites working for structural change: eradicating racism from the justice system, for example, and abolishing racial inequalities in public education.
For DeWolf, doing genealogy work and telling the particular stories he digs is a precursor to structural repair. Americans must "gather in sorrow," he said. He quoted his cousin, Katrina Browne, who testified in June at Congressional hearings for HB40, a House bill that, when passed, would create a commission to study the reparations issue: "It's good for the soul of a person, people and a nation to right the situation. "
O & # 39; Rourke said that he was in agreement. He said he would like to try to find the descendants of Eliza and Rose.
In the meantime, he said that the detention of his ancestors and his participation in Confederation were "part of the story of my family that I will share during the election campaign".
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