George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Slave Trader

[NewDeal_Dem]

90. you're the only person who brought up the effect of the new deal on black people. and you seem

very angry because I've chosen to discuss the origins of the bush family's money and power.

Here's more:

The Bush Family's Slaveholding Past

A new book by Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, mentions in passing that at one time some of the president's family owned slaves. Weisberg doesn't dwell on the links between the White House and the antebellum past except to say the Bush clan's story is a long-held "family secret."

The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the Illinois Times, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers...With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.

The tragic story of America's slave days inspires disabling levels of fear among whites and anger among blacks. Probably neither the 43rd president nor his father, the 41st, possesses the introspection needed to grasp the relationship between the Bush family's slaveholding past and its present circumstances without escaping into defensiveness. Still, President Bush has talked about slavery from several microphones, most memorably in a 2003 speech on Gorée Island, one of the "slave castles" in West Africa from which captive youth and children were dispatched to the Americas. Speechwriters likely supplied the words on that occasion when the president said, "slavery was one of the greatest crimes of history." But the words fell short of an accounting by the White House for America's role in the Middle Passage, and they came before the revelation of the Bush family's own link to the slave past.

The heirs of slaveholders are not responsible for the past; but in a better world, they would be accountable for that past. They would make an effort to deal with the slave story, talk about it, and try to come to terms with it.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2008/02/the_bush_familys_slaveholding_past.2.html