Slavery links Sharpton and Thurmond

NEW YORK – The Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond – a discovery the civil rights activist called “shocking” on Sunday.

Sharpton learned of his connection to Thurmond, once a prominent defender of segregation, last week through the Daily News, which asked genealogists to trace his roots, with Sharpton’s permission.

“It was probably the most shocking thing in my life,” Sharpton said Sunday, the same day the tabloid revealed the story.

Ancestry.com genealogists uncovered the ancestral ties using a variety of documents that included census, marriage and death records.

They found that Sharpton’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond’s great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

Thurmond, of South Carolina, was once considered an icon of racial segregation. During his 1948 bid for president, he promised to preserve segregation and, in 1957, he filibustered for more than 24 hours against a civil rights bill.

Thurmond was seen as softening his segregation stance later in his life. He died in 2003, at 100. Thurmond’s children have acknowledged that Thurmond fathered a biracial |daughter.

Sharpton, who ran for president in 2004 on a ticket of racial justice, said he met Thurmond once in 1991 when he visited Washington, D.C. Sharpton said the meeting was “awkward.”