I believe the underline coating of Obama’s candidacy is resumed in one funny sentence spoken by Word Connerly, who has lead campaigns in California, Washington and Michigan against affirmative action, this gentleman said” I suppose we should be very happy about that because it bespeaks the nation’s yearnings to get beyond race.” To polity inform the readers Connerly was discussing how Obama appeals to a large segment of American people especially White voters. What Connerly said seems to be everyone’s focus when it comes to Obama. Do we know who Obama is more than that he is the first black person to run for president? Illinois’s senator, Barack Obama has become a superstar since he declared his candidacy in February. Everyone has fixed their eyes on Barack Obama, because if elected he would become the first black U.S. president with white ancestors who owned slaves. You could ask researcher William Addams Reitwiesner, who states this in his first draft of research into Obama’s roots. Rietwiesner went back into the 1850 Census records to confirm what Obama wrote in his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father”. Obama had written that one of his great-great-grandfathers was a decorated soldier in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. He also wrote that family rumors said the man was a distant relative of Jefferson Davis, president of the breakaway Confederacy of the southern states. Reitwiesner found records from Kentucky, a border state between North and South, that one of Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvell also owned two black slaves, a 60 year-old man and a 58 year old woman.The Baltimore Sun Newspaper first reported Reitwiesner’s work and asked genealogical experts to review it, but they would not confirm the findings. However, Mr. Reitwieser’s findings don’t stop there. He has also found that two other presidential candidates were descendants of slave owners. Republican John McCain and Democrat John Edwards. McCain is from Arizona, which was not a state during the Civil War and Edwards is from North Carolina in the heart of the old Confederacy. Why is it that we are so interested in finding out where these candidates’s ancestor’s come from? You ask me and I’ll be more interested with what these candidates stand for. I’ll be doing research all right, but researching their beliefs and values for this nation, not wasting my time with their family tree. Is America really yearning to get beyond race like Connerly stated? Or are we losing our wits in the ground, while we dig for their roots and ignore their potential?
Black U.S. presidential candidate Obama's white ancestors siad to have owned slaves
The Associated Press
INTERNATIONAL Herald Tribune
