When You Discover Your Ancestor Was the Head of the KKK

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Did you catch our segment on Monday with New York Times opinion columnist Mr. Bouie, where we discussed the 100th anniversary of the race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and some other racial pogroms as he calls them, acts of widespread white community violence against Black neighborhoods with impunity from the local government? Well, during that segment, we invited callers who had victims or perpetrators of such violence in their own ancestry to talk about how they have processed having that in their family backgrounds.

In case you missed it, I want to play a clip from a caller named Olivia who had this troubling family history to share.

Olivia: Basically over the last year for a couple of reasons, I've been tasked with doing some sort of family history. My family, I'm from North Carolina, live in New York, staying in New York, I'm from North Carolina and have generations of ties to Wilmington, North Carolina, where there was a massacre, not a riot, a massacre in 1898. One of the things that has come out is a family member of ours, we just didn't get into details. I come from a very progressive family. At least, my immediate family, very liberal, very progressive.

One of the things I've learned just recently is that Roger Moore, who was the head of the KKK of Wilmington and the head of the Red Shirts, who basically was responsible for massacring many Black people, was my grandmother's cousin, basically her grandfather.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Can you imagine uncovering something like that about one of your own relatives who you didn't previously know about? Well, Olivia is hardly alone in that experience. Many Americans with roots tracing back to slavery have histories on one side or the other of enslavement that they now can't unlearn. With us now is someone who has been doing the work of unpacking this kind of history for a decade. She is Sharon Leslie Morgan, founder of Our Black Ancestry, a genealogist writer and multicultural marketing expert, who has served as a consultant to the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and is a founding member of the group Afrogenius.

She is also co-author of the book, Gather at the Table written with a direct descendant of one of the largest slave-trading families in American history. Thanks for joining us, Sharon. Nice to have you with us on WNYC.

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Thank you for allowing me to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start with some of your own story and how your partnership for your book came about?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Well, my story is that I grew up in Chicago and I started researching my family many, many, many years ago. I found that we came from this from Noxubee County, Mississippi and that my two times great-grandmother had 17 children with the nephew of the person who owned her. Uncovering that history has been a lifelong quest. It inspired me to establish Our Black Ancestry so that I could share the things that I learned with other people. The thing that stands out about this is the historical harm that has been experienced by all of America, basically because our very foundations are based in slavery as the economic engine that drove the prosperity that we enjoy today.

Brian Lehrer: Unfortunately, your coauthor, who is a direct descendant of one of the largest slave-trading families in American history, couldn't join us in the segment today. What was that like considering your history as you just described it, your family history, and your co-authors?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Well, it was also shocking to him, Tom DeWolf lives in Oregon, and he is descended from a family from Rhode Island and Rhode Island was the nexus of the slave trade for America. His ancestors imported from Africa, more people than anyone else. He was shocked to find that out. We ended up establishing a connection to try to uncover what do you do when you learn about this history? How do you heal it? Because it is something that affects us today because of America's history with these egregious historical harms, the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of African-Americans, what do you do now?

What does that mean to us now? What do you do now to correct the paradigm?

Brian Lehrer: Do you have an answer to that question?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: I have some thoughts about what happens. I don't know if it's the final answer, but the few things that I do know are that what we have experienced is historical harm. Everybody in America has been traumatized by what happened. We have for African-Americans 400 years of historical harm that we have to deal with. You have slavery, sharecropping, peonage, the Red Summer of 1919, which goes beyond the Tulsa massacre. You have lynching, you have Sundown towns, you have the terror that was inflicted upon people. You have medical experimentation.

The big picture is that we have the diminishment of Black humanity, and therefore you have it being expressed now in incidences of community and police violence against people because we were considered less than human. Therefore, we are an object of fear and therefore we are an object of discrimination. The answer is, I think we have to learn healing the trauma means that you have to confront the past. You have to look at it truthfully and say, "Yes, these things happened. What do I do as a modern person today?" One of the big things is building relationships like I did with Tom DeWolf when we wrote the book.

We went back and we confronted the history of what happened. We did this road trip that related to our genealogies, and he's a white guy. I'm a Black woman. We went to the same place, same time, and then tried to dissect that. Like, what do you think, what do I think? Confronting the past. The truth of the past is very important. Then what we learned through the book is that it's building relationships because people remain separated today because they don't have relationships with a broad universe of people.

The xenophobia that is happening in America today is largely a result of people not knowing other people. There are universal things about everybody, about humanity. We all believe in our families, our children. Building those relationships is important. On the note of what we have to do to heal the historical trauma in America is building those relationships, stepping beyond your comfort zone, trying to restore our families as a genealogist. That's what I do is that I restore families because during slavery families were sold away, families were ruptured, so we can reconstruct those families.

Then in order to do that, we really need the white people to get involved because they have the records that we need in order to reconstruct our families. They need to think about making amends. They didn't do the bad thing, but today they can do the good thing and they can act to change the paradigm. We have to do something really different and be open-minded and research the history, confront the truth, and then do something to make things right.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have time in this segment for maybe a couple of more personal history stories. Our Jamelle Bouie segment on Monday was more about national history, this, as you're hearing from Sharon Leslie Morgan, is more about personal history and how it relates to the national history. We want to invite a few calls to see who else might be out there like our caller Olivia from Monday, who has another story that other listeners might learn from. Do you have victims or perpetrators in your ancestry? 646-435-7280, we want to know how do you reconcile with that history?

Do you do any of the things that Sharon was just describing? Your own personal road trip like the one she took with her coauthor, whether it's a road trip physically or a road trip of the mind. How did you even learn about this thing in your family's background? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Maybe you just have a question for a genealogist relevant to this topic, we have one here with us. Give us a call at 646-435-7280. As we see if another call or two comes in, going back to the caller Olivia who told us about her family's connection to the head of the KKK in Wilmington, North Carolina, I want to play a clip from the end of her call, where she explains how the news made her feel.

Olivia: I mean, really pretty sickening. I was on my computer and I was looking some stuff up and I actually got sick to my-- it felt a little sick to my stomach. I've been obsessive really going down this rabbit hole at this point, my poor husband's like, "What are you doing? What are you trying to do here?" If anything, it's like it just makes me-- I do as much as I can today to do the right thing, we give to causes, we are allies, we do all this, but at the same time, this almost makes me want to double down on my efforts and maybe get a little more specific, maybe do some stuff in Wilmington to try to make up for this part of my family.

Brian Lehrer: Sharon, what'd you think of Olivia's resolve to make things right as she put it now as much as she can and maybe as somebody who has no current connection to Wilmington, North Carolina to maybe even do something there?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Olivia is definitely on the right path because that is part of confronting the history. There are things that you can do when you research your family and you go back into your root community to be able to share the information that you find. Enslaved people did not have surnames. When you do genealogical research, it is very hard to connect people. We need white people to expose the documents and things that they have in order to make that possible. Another big thing for me is House Bill 40 to study slavery and discrimination and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans.

This is a bill that has languished in the Congress for more than a generation. It comes up every year and it's like nobody wants to look at it, nobody wants to study it, nobody wants to think about it. Everybody has gotten reparations except Black people. Japanese people got reparations for being in internment camps, Native Americans have gotten reparations for things that have happened to them. Certainly not enough, but nobody wants to look at Black people. I think that it's like, we're always at the end. We're at the bottom of what you consider because our humanity was diminished in so many ways.

All of the things that have happened to us over 400 years, how do you correct that? People think it is such a big issue, you can't get your arms around it. The way I think about it is that you can't deal with the big, big thing, you have to deal with the small things. You deal with whatever is in your personal life, so that you can make amends, so that you can share some information, so that you can do something in the community, to address the historical harm.

Brian Lehrer: Chris in Montclair has a question for you. Chris, you're on WNYC, hello?

Chris: Good morning. I grew up in Virginia and my middle name is Tyler. While I've never researched my genealogy, it was always the family legend that somewhere way back when, we were related to John Tyler, the president who followed William Henry Harrison. John Tyler was a plantation owner in Virginia and presumably owned slaves. My mother's middle name was Calhoun and the family legend was that somewhere way back when, my family had a connection to the Calhoun family of South Carolina. John C. Calhoun being probably the archist segregationist and secessionist of them all.

I'd like to ask the guest what she would have me do and then if I were to find out that there was some connection to either John Tyler, a presumed slave owner or John C, Calhoun, what she would have me do then.

Brian Lehrer: Sharon, can you help him?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Yes. Those names are very familiar and I will tell you that they were slaveholders. What you can do is uncover whatever information is available in your family and make it public. The family search, which is the premier source for research is the Mormon Church sponsors genealogical research. They have a project that is called ROAR, Reclaiming Our African Roots. Our Black Ancestry is a partner with that, and one of the things that we're doing is that we're loading information that connects people who were slaveholders with the names of the people that they enslaved.

If you have information like that, it is extremely useful and you can send me an email smorgan@ourblackancestry.com. I will get it into the queue for loading on family search.

Brian Lehrer: That's great. smorgan@ourblackancestry.com. Chris, do it, let us know if you find anything. Damian in Midtown you're on WNYC. Hi Damian.

Damian: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, and you? What's you got?

Damian: Good. Very good. Well, I lived down a couple-- well, there were rumors in my family that my mother and one of my aunts have said that they had believed that they had owned slaves. My mother's from Spain, my father was born in Portugal and they migrated. I decided to do a DNA test. When it came back, it turned out that my mother, not only is truly from Spain and my father, that they owned slaves, not just in Spain, but in the United States, the Caribbean, and all through Latin America. That the Delions and the Castillos were cousins.

They had an entire business that they-- it was a profitable business of having slaves throughout all of Latin America and the United States. I still did some extra search, but the more I found out, I am like, "Oh my God." My mother, she had some clue, but not too much. When I told her about it, I saw she was getting very upset. Then I found out that in Venezuela, there is a whole entire mountain that the government won't even touch because it belongs to the family and my mother said, "Let the jungle take it."

She won't even acknowledge any of that. I had always assumed-- I knew that my family had went on my father's side. He came back as Arawak India. I knew that was one time there was some story in our family, in Trinidad and Tobago when the Spanish came there, that they had attacked the Arawaks. The Arawaks somehow fought them off and they would not-- There's a village there that the people they said look exactly the way they looked so many generations ago.

I'm trying maybe in the next three or four months or so because of COVID they're not letting anybody go there. [laughs] The president is not joking, but I was very, very shocked to find out that.

Brian Lehrer: What would you do when you go there?

Damian: Well, first I want to find out that-- If turned out that the family is linked to the-- there's a bank called Lloyd's Bank that's linked to my mother's family, that the family had profited and still, I guess you can say is profiting off of the-- To be honest with you, I don't even know what I'm going to do, because I am because-

Brian Lehrer: No, go ahead I want to hear that attitude.

Damian: -I am so shocked. That what I thought that I was is [laughs] actually nothing. Then as I found out that, they had the names they had the business name, they had titles came up, all sorts of things. The more I dig, is the more I keep-- My aunt was like, "What are you looking for?" I was like, "We should know our family tree." [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: He's looking for the truth. That's some load of something that he's sitting on, Sharon. What can he do with it, besides what he already said?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: That's what you do. People do not realize that the foundation of the wealth of the Western world was founded on slavery, having capitalism at its best, exploitation of every resource. You have free labor. It was shocking to me when I found out that of the 12 million people who were kidnapped from Africa, half a million ended up in America. What we know as America today. Many more of them millions went to South America and there were way stations along the route where Europeans went to the Caribbean, enslaved people, raised sugar, provided things like cotton, sugar, tobacco to Europe.

They wiped out everybody. Like when you talk about the Arawaks, all the Arawaks are gone because they were wiped out like Native Americans were in what we call the United States. What you do is you do exactly what you're doing. It's important in confronting-- When I say the healing comes from confronting the past, you have to look into that and you have to understand the scope of what happened and find your place in there for what do I do. What Sharon decided to do, that's me, is that I came back to the place where my ancestors were enslaved.

I now live in a little town in Noxubee County, Mississippi. I live very close to the plantation where my ancestors were enslaved, and I've been able to do an incredible amount of research and to get in touch with what happened in the past. It has helped me obtain peace in being able to do positive things for this community now in which I live. Because one of the things we have here is the breach between white people and Black people, and we need to close that breach. The history is the history it happened. You didn't do it. If you're living today, you didn't experience it if you're living today, but you have an obligation to make some type of amend.

We have to restore our families. We have to act to change the paradigm so that this breach can be closed because if we don't do this, we are forever going to have this problem in race relations.

Brian Lehrer: Well, thank you so much. First to our callers because Olivia in Monday segment really started us down this spur off of the original segment on Monday with Jamelle Bouie. Then we found our amazing guests, Sharon Leslie Morgan, and hopefully, this was useful to you listeners and thanks so much for calling and participating in it. Of course, Sharon to you, Sharon, Leslie Morgan, founder of Our Black Ancestry. She's a genealogist writer and multicultural marketing expert who has served as a consultant to the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and as a founding member of the group, Afro Genius and author of the book, I lost the book title. You say it.

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Gather at the Table.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for gathering at our table. Thank you so much.

Sharon Leslie Morgan: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian there on WNYC, Christine Quinn next, stay with us.

 

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