New York City
Black activist Al Sharpton has a surprising connection to the late, onetime segregationist politician Strom Thurmond, the New York Daily News reported this week. Sharpton’s great-grandfather Coleman Sharpton was once a slave of Thurmond’s distant cousin Julia Thurmond, genealogists said. The Daily News, with Sharpton’s consent, asked a team from the Web site Ancestry.com to research Sharpton’s lineage. He now plans to seek DNA testing to learn if he was actually related to Thurmond, who once ran for president on a segregationist platform. After Thurmond died in 2003, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 78, revealed that she was the daughter of Thurmond and the Thurmond family’s black housekeeper.
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