Amid Confederate flag racism uproar, a reminder that Obama's ancestors once owned slaves

(NaturalNews) It was mentioned a few times and then dropped about the time that then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was considering his first run for the Oval Office.

In a March 2, 2007, report, The Baltimore Sun noted an ironic twist about the man who would become the first African American president of the United States: Forebears of his white mother owned slaves themselves.

As reported by the paper:

According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

The records reviewed by the Sun show that Overall, who was 30 at the time, owned a 15-year-old black girl and a 25-year-old black man. Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black male and a 58-year-old black female. The paper noted further that during the period around the 1850 census slaves were listed by owner, age, sex and "colour," not by name.

When the Sun contacted the Obama campaign, a spokesman did not refute the information, brushing off the history by claiming Obama's ancestors "are representative of America."

Really? Like the Confederacy?

Hypocrisy dominates this debate

"While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War," campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. "And it is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the United States."

But wait – isn't slavery at the core of the battle to rewrite or eliminate Confederate history?

What do you call someone who labels any and all former slave owners as racist bigots, while blowing off the fact that his own relatives did the same thing?

A hypocrite.

The research traces the Duvalls to Mareen Duvall, a major land owner in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in the 1600s, the Sun reported. The inventory of his estate in 1694 names 18 slaves, according to a family history published in 1952.

So, Obama's relatives weren't just slave owners – they were big time slave owners.

"The twist is very interesting," Ronald Walters, a political scientist who was director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, told the Sun at the time of publication. "It deepens his connection with the experience of slavery, even if it deepens it on a different side of the equation."

You could say that. But if Obama really felt like he had some sort of unique perspective on the subject, you might think he would have made mention of it before – say, in his 1995 memoir, which just happened to be titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Yet, he didn't; he made no mention of his mother's slave-owning relatives in that tome.

So, is this relevant? Should this knowledge provide at least some context and perspective to the Left's, and Obama's, continual references to "our dark past" – a past that his own family, however distant, perpetuated? Should it matter that Obama's mother's ancestors were among the few Southern families who held any slaves at all?

Does this mean that Obama should be banned – banished and shamed from public – like all the Confederate memorabilia the Left is now calling for?

What about the latest Democratic presidential candidate?

Or how about current Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton?

As reported by The Weekly Standard, she appeared June 26 at the Virginia Democratic party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Friday in northern Virginia.

That would be Thomas Jefferson, U.S. president and slave owner, and Andrew Jackson, U.S. president and slave owner. Hillary, meanwhile, has called for all Confederate symbols to be taken down all over the country.

"America's descent into a totalitarian regime of hysterical thought police is nearly complete. In just the last 72 hours, total P.C. insanity has swept the nation and all its big retailers as howling leftist maniacs have used the label 'tolerance' to initiate what can only be called a modern-day book burning and Orwellian censorship of artistic expression," noted Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.

You can read his entire column here.

Sources:

http://www.baltimoresun.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.weeklystandard.com