Post by jonnygemini on Feb 1, 2006 21:57:55 GMT -5
transcribed from today's Wall Street Journal, I couldn't get in to the electronic version pay site and all:
just a couple stories Gates found while researching the geneaologies of famous ORIGINAL people termed African-American in the program...Gates DNA sez he has Ashkenazi Jew blood...but WATCH!!!!!
If the promise of America was the right to own land, very few blacks were able to do before the middle of the 20th century. But some did.
Orpah Winfrey's great great grandfather Constantine Winfrey, a farm worker in Mississippi had the audacity to appraoch a white man, John Watson, in 1876, and make a wager: If he could pick 10 bales of cotton in one year, Watson would give Winfrey 80 acres of his land in return. (In 1870, a bale of cotton weighed 500 lbs.) On June 21, 1881 a property deed recorded the land exchange between the two. Constantine Winfrey listed in the 1876 census as illiterate: 10 years later, he had learned to read and write. And when, in 1906, the local "colored school" was slated for destruction, Winfrey saved it by having it moved onto his property.
Chris Tucker's great great grandfather, Theodore Arthur Bryant Sr. sold off parcels of his land to his neighbors for bleow market prices so they wouldn't join the great migration north, therby saving the black community of FLat Rock, Ga...
Orpah Winfrey's great great grandfather Constantine Winfrey, a farm worker in Mississippi had the audacity to appraoch a white man, John Watson, in 1876, and make a wager: If he could pick 10 bales of cotton in one year, Watson would give Winfrey 80 acres of his land in return. (In 1870, a bale of cotton weighed 500 lbs.) On June 21, 1881 a property deed recorded the land exchange between the two. Constantine Winfrey listed in the 1876 census as illiterate: 10 years later, he had learned to read and write. And when, in 1906, the local "colored school" was slated for destruction, Winfrey saved it by having it moved onto his property.
Chris Tucker's great great grandfather, Theodore Arthur Bryant Sr. sold off parcels of his land to his neighbors for bleow market prices so they wouldn't join the great migration north, therby saving the black community of FLat Rock, Ga...
just a couple stories Gates found while researching the geneaologies of famous ORIGINAL people termed African-American in the program...Gates DNA sez he has Ashkenazi Jew blood...but WATCH!!!!!