Critics of former Black militant activist and scholar Angela Davis say she should pay other Black people reparations after it was revealed that her ancestors were among the very first Europeans to colonize North America.
After the airing of a recent episode of Henry Louis Gates’ hit PBS show, “Finding Our Roots,” now in its ninth season, it was revealed that Davis’ ancestors were on the Mayflower, fought in the American Revolution, and owned enslaved Africans.
The 79-year-old Davis says she knew she had white family members on her mother’s side but not on her father’s side. He never revealed he was half-white.
“I always imagined my ancestors as the people who were enslaved,” Davis said during the show.
In one scene of the episode that also featured Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Charles Johnson, Gates shares that Davis’ mother, who was adopted, had a high-society white father. Davis’ grandfather was a senator and respected lawyer in Alabama in the early 1900s, with a white wife and other children (not including her mother).
She also learned that her fourth great-grandfather was a patriot that served in the Revolutionary War. After showing her documents, including a muster roll, where he is assigned the task as a drummer for his regime, the Harvard professor and nationally recognized genealogist asked her, “When you were studying the American Revolution, did it ever occur to you that you could have an ancestor?”
She quickly responded, “Absolutely not. Absolutely not.”
He followed up, “What do you do with that information … Now, that you know that you are descended from someone who did in fact serve the American Revolution?”
The startled activist was at a loss for words but said she believes “the American Revolution should have gone further than it actually did.”
But once gaining her composure, she said, she was “glad” to receive this information.
“I’m remembering…
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