United States:Black civil rights activist and former Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton has expressed shock at the news that he is descended from slaves owned by the family of the late segregationist senator Strom Thurmond.
Mr Sharpton said yesterday, however, that he wants a DNA test to determine if he had a blood relationship with Mr Thurmond, who died in 2003 at the age of 100. "I can't find out anything more shocking than I've already learned," the civil rights activist said.
Genealogists at ancestry.com discovered that Mr Sharpton's great-grandfather Coleman Sharpton was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Mr Thurmond's great-great-grandfather.
The South Carolina senator, who ran for president in 1948 promising to maintain racial segregation, was one of the longest-serving senators in US history. Originally a Democrat, he became a Republican in 1964, after President Lyndon B Johnson championed civil rights for African-Americans.
Despite Mr Thurmond's racialist politics, he fathered a child during a liaison with a black housekeeper at his parents' house. Mr Sharpton said he had met Mr Thurmond only once, at what he called an "awkward" meeting arranged by the late soul musician James Brown.
"I was not happy to meet him because what he had done all his life," Mr Sharpton said.
Genealogists say it is unlikely that Mr Sharpton is related to the late senator, although sexual relationships between plantation owners and their slaves were not uncommon.