Obama’s slave-owning forebears revealed

The Times in March 2007 revealed what many of us have been saying for a while, but I don't remember being covered by the BBC.

"THE maternal ancestors of Barack Obama, the Democrat who hopes to become America’s first black president, once owned slaves, genealogists have revealed.

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According to the genealogists, George Washington Overall, Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather, owned two slaves, a 15-year-old girl and 25-year-old man, who were listed in the 1850 Kentucky census. Another maternal ancestor owned two older slaves.

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Debra Dickerson, a writer, commented recently that, “‘Blacks’, in our political and social reality, mean those descended from West African slaves,” and said Obama had acquired the “benefits of black progress” without having borne any of the burden."