No Sunday Radio Show but here is something to chew on in the meantime-Black/White Family Reunion in Arkansas

Please accept my apologies for the delays for the past few days as well as Sunday's Afronerd Radio preemption but I would rather cancel a show than proceed with a less than fruitful program. In the interim, let me post a few stories (along with my customary editorializing) for our readers, supporters (and detractors) to flesh out-and of course, let us know what you think. First up, is a story by way of the Christian Science Monitor highlighting a family reunion between the races. As people of color, we have always been keenly aware of our European slave-based lineage-perhaps White folk are starting to get or admit to the memo (or is that email).

Hell, even Reverend Press & Curl received his antebellum email when he discovered that his family was owned by Strom Thurmond's klan (ahem, clan) with dna testing allegedly in the works to affirm a genealogical connection. Perhaps the best known case of a slave-based interracial-familial liaison pertains to the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings affair. Hemings was not only Jefferson's slave but also a concubine whose union with the third POTUS allegedly resulted in several children. Jefferson's White descendents have long denied that such a union took place yet several dna tests on Black alleged Jefferson family members bear out a contrary point of view. Check out this excerpt from Wikipedia's synopsis on Sally Heming:

Thomas Jefferson Foundation report
In January 2000, a group of specialists from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, published a study on the controversy initiated soon after the Nature paper. Their near-unanimous[22] report[23] stated that "although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings."

Now let's take a look at an excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor article, which denotes a happier instance where Black and White relatives have accepted and embraced their sordid slave history opting to move onward and upward:

Lakeport, Ark. - Richard Johnson and Harry Taylor have spent their adult lives 1,100 miles apart – Mr. Johnson as a human-resources director in Texas, Mr. Taylor as a tool-and-dye maker in Kentucky. That's not unusual for cousins. But Taylor is black; Johnson is white. And as the two men embrace today on a green Arkansas farm, under a Southern sun with bolls of cotton blowing in the breeze, the homestead in the background isn't just any white colonial or red-brick ranch. Nor is this just any family reunion.

Lakeport is a plantation – a stark fact and a complex heritage that can evoke pride, shame, anger, fondness, and humiliation, often all at once. Over 150 years ago, African-American slaves carved this place from the forests that dotted the riverbanks, while white landowners moved into the stately "Big House," which could be a backdrop for "Gone with the Wind."

Now, as the two men pose for a picture at a rare reunion marking the reopening of the plantation, Johnson hugs Taylor.

"You never know who you're related to," Taylor says with a laugh.

The photo they took might double as a prism on the Old South and the New. It's a glimpse of how far the country has come since slavery, with the descendants of its privilege and pain standing before cotton fields, their arms slung around each other, with equal rights and separate livelihoods.

Yet a sensitive past still lingers here, both on and off Lakeport grounds. Plenty of people didn't want this gathering to happen, and part of the day's celebration occurs in an African-American cemetery where slaves, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers are buried – without tombstones.

Still, that the ceremony is even taking place evokes a spirit of remembrance and reconciliation, of healing about the past and openness about the future. As the names of the African-American dead are read aloud, a white woman wipes tears from her eyes. "Let this help us remember the past," says Deacon R.C. Royal after reading from Psalms.

To read the CSM article in its entirety, click on the link below:

Family Reunion-in Black and White