Race relations: Masters and slaves of America's past

In a sense it is just a historical oddity: after all, isn't everyone in the human race said to be at least a 12th cousin of everyone else? And what could be more commonplace, albeit shameful, than that a black American's ancestor was a slave owned by the ancestor of a white American?

Not so, however, when one of the individuals involved is the Reverend Al Sharpton, the 52-year-old civil rights champion and, along with Jesse Jackson, the most visible spokesman of black America, and the other is Strom Thurmond, the late senator for North Carolina, and for more than half a century the symbol of segregation and racial oppression in the Old South.

The pair do have one unusual item in common on their CVs. Both ran for the White House, albeit from utterly different starting points: "Ol' Strom" back in 1948 was a Dixiecrat, with a platform of "states rights" - back then code language for continuing segregation; Mr Sharpton just three years ago, as an advocate of racial justice and equality. But everything else separates them - except for this slender historical thread, unearthed by the website Ancestry.com, a specialist in the genealogy of African-Americans.

The discovery came by chance, after a reporter for the New York Daily News approached researchers for the website and asked them to look into his own ancestry. The reporter then wondered whether Mr Sharpton would agree to an investigation of his family history, as part of the story he planned. The latter agreed. In his wildest dreams he could never have imagined what it would come up with.

Back in the mid-19th century, it transpires, Coleman Sharpton, a black slave who was Al Sharpton's great-grandfather, was sent along with his wife and two children by his wealthy white owner from South Carolina to Florida as a present for the slave owner's daughter-in-law. Her name, the researchers discovered as they combed through census, estate and birth, marriage and death records, was Julia Thurmond. And her grandfather was the great-great-grandfather of Strom Thurmond, who died in June 2003 a few months after becoming the first US senator still serving at the age of 100.

In terms of a connection is it not much. Julia and Strom were first cousins, but twice removed. Coleman Sharpton (who, as happened frequently with slaves, originally took his surname from his white owner, Alexander Sharpton) was freed after the US Civil War. He became a wood hauler and his son, Coleman Junior - Mr Sharpton's grandfather - was a turpentine worker, later to become the owner of a small grocery store during the Depression. Like his grandson, he was also a minister.

The linking of destinies was, and is, of little consequence in itself. But it constitutes a cameo of America's anguished racial history, whose repercussions are felt to this day. As a flabbergasted Mr Sharpton said at a news conference after being told of the finding: "In the story of the Thurmonds and the Sharptons is the story of the shame and glory of America."

"It's chilling, it's amazing, I had no idea of this interlocking past," he told the newspaper before adding, presciently, that: "I don't know if you realise how crazy this will be when it gets out."

In the county town of Edgefield, in South Carolina's "Up Country" and where Strom Thurmond was born and died, the reaction was of similar amazement. Relatives of the former senator were at best nervously amused, and some refused to believe the revelation. "A bunch of baloney," one said.

Another, Thurmond's 61-year-old niece, Ellen Senter, wondered whether the connection had anything other than curiosity value. "If you go back that far in history, you're going to find lots of people connected to each other, from different walks of life. You won't find many native South Carolinians today whose family, if you traced back far enough, didn't own slaves."

The senator and the minister apparently met just once, through an unlikely common acquaintance, the late singer James Brown. Mr Sharpton, once involved in the music world, had worked as a tour manager for Brown, who in turn knew Thurmond as a fellow celebrity, albeit in the different field of politics, from the Edgefield region where they both grew up.

The encounter by all accounts was not especially cordial. "I was not happy to visit him because of what he had been all his life," said Mr Sharpton, who has made headlines as a vociferous advocate of victims in racially charged incidents in his adopted home town of New York - incidents that would not have raised an eyebrow as Thurmond was growing up in the Deep South.

But after the link was revealed at the weekend, Mr Sharpton regathered his wits enough to make a pointed joke. "Maybe I'm the revenge of Coleman," he said. "They [the Thurmond clan] are just recovering from his black child. Now they are about to get this bomb dropped upon them." The reference was to Essie Mae Washington-Williams, an 82-year-old retired teacher living in California. A few months after Strom died in 2003, she was sensationally identified as his daughter, born when he was 22, the result of a fling with a 16-year-old black maid working in the Thurmond household.

The episode was typical of the era, when blacks, even after emancipation, were regarded as little more than chattels by the whites who employed them - to be used and discarded, with scant opportunity for recourse in a white-dominated system. However, it also illustrates an often overlooked aspect of Thurmond himself.

Yes he was a racist, who broke with his Democratic party because of his long opposition to desegregation, running as an independent candidate against a sitting Democratic president, Harry Truman, in the 1940s, and then bolting his party in revulsion at Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Thurmond still holds the record for the longest Senate filibuster, a 24-hour-18-minute effort on 29-30 August 1957, against a civil rights measure of the Eisenhower administration.

However, it was not always so. In his youth, Thurmond as a state attorney was brave enough to prosecute whites in a lynching case. In 1946, as South Carolina's governor, he spent money equally on black and white schools, and appointed the first black member of the state's medical examiner's board.

Later on, when he realised that LBJ's reforms were there to stay, he switched tack again. He took on black staffers, and even voted to establish an annual holiday in honour of Martin Luther King.

He is buried in a family plot in the cemetery of the First Baptist church, in the shadow of a Confederate flag. A short distance away, in the centre of the town green, is a statue of him.

It is adorned with the words of Hamlet about his dead father: "Take him all in all, he is a man. We shall not see his like again." Now the astonishing life of this man who embodied the racial history of an entire American century has received one last bizarre embellishment.

Mr Sharpton himself has requested a DNA test to confirm the finding, although the thorough research by Ancestry.com leaves little room for doubt.

There the matter presumably will end. He has not tried to contact the Thurmond family, Mr Sharpton said, and they have not been in touch with him.

And what would there be to say? This is a story of nothing, and yet of everything, in which facts speak louder than words.