The Black McCains: An American Story

Interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal about African-American descendants of slaves from the McCain plantation in Mississippi.

Evidently, they believe that they are related to the white McCains by bloodline as well. But in this case blood is not thicker than water... because these McCains are supporters of Barack Obama.

The black McCains of today were raised to believe that they were blood relatives of the white McCains, dating back to slavery times. White McCains say they're unaware of any biological connection between the families. A spokesman for Sen. McCain declined to comment.

Why is it that the black families always know they're related to the white families, but not the other way around? Hmmm..

Well, if my own family is at all representative, my black grandfather had a white Louisiana landowning father "Papa Charlie," who had his own white wife. My black great-grandmother was a sharecropper on "Papa Charlie's" plantation and had six children by him.

As the laws would have it, when Papa Charlie died, the white side of the family got all the land, the black children got nothing.

(As luck and hard work would have it, now the black side of the family is full of college graduates. The white relatives in Lousiana...not so much.)

My grandfather went back to Louisiana as an adult and met his white half-brother. His brother confessed that they always knew the black siblings were around, even if they weren't supposed to.

This piece is intriguing because it shows the trajectory of two families and how they were linked through slavery.

Ms. McCain and her siblings are descended from two of about 120 slaves held before the end of the Civil War at Teoc, the Mississippi plantation owned by the family of Republican nominee John McCain's great-great-grandfather.

In a year when the historic nature of Sen. Obama's candidacy is drawing much comment, the case of the Teoc McCains offers another quintessential American narrative in black and white. For the black McCain family, it is a story of triumph over the legacy of slavery; for the white McCains, it is the evolution of a 19th-century cotton dynasty into one rooted in an ethic of military and national service.

"I think that since we can't undo what has been done, that the most effective thing for us to do is figure out how to put things in perspective and go from there," says Ms. McCain, who holds a doctorate in psychology and teaches at Mott Community College in Flint, Mich. "To harbor anger and hostility and all that is counterproductive."

Read more here

I completely agree that the time for anger and hostility is over. It's counterproductive toward achieving your goals. In my own life, I am surrounded by ALL races. I ended up marrying a white man whose grandparents immigrated here from Italy.

My family left the South and came to California in the 1930s. From there my grandfather worked as a Red Cap on the railroad. At that time, that was a very prestigious job for a black man to have because you could work for tips. My father joined the military and was able to get a GI loan to help him build a house and start a family. My parents weren't college educated, but took advantage of scholarships and loans to send us to college. And they did experience racism along the way, but they persevered and were able to make great strides.

Obama's biography is attractive to me because he is representative of this American journey and how far we've come. I'm never one to deny that racism still exists in our society. The haters are still out there. But thankfully I've encountered more good people than bad, more people who are more concerned about who I am as a person than the color of my skin.

UPDATE: Click here to watch CNN's report on the black McCains.