More Irony Found Deep in America's Family Tree

I found another track in American history that seems as unlikely as it seems a necessary part of our nation's identity.

It all started with a conversation with Corrie about an activist she'd heard about. His name was Walter Francis White. He was a Black American, but had very light skin, blond hair and blue eyes. He passed for a white man in most places, but was raised by his Black parents---his mother, though, was very fair skinned with light eyes. He used this ability while younger to do research on lynchings, as police and witnesses would never hesitate tho tell him the details. 

Eventually he was found out, and after being run out of town with his life intact, he parlayed his leadership skills into helping run the NAACP and working with both FDR and Harry Truman.

It seems pretty obvious that this dude could, and likely would, pass for white in the era. But he identified as a Black man, and instead of using his appearance to live comfortably away from the degradations of the times (or really, any times?), he fought tirelessly for justice, a job made more possible by that same appearance.

And that appearance---the very light skin, blond hair and blue eyes---points to a dark part of American history that most white Americans tend to ignore. Enslaved women had no rights over their bodies, and slave-owning white men could act with impunity. However reprehensible and disgusting their behavior could be, there were no laws prohibiting that behavior.

Of Walter's 32 great-great-great grandparents, only 5 were Black enslaved people, and 27 were white. When I found a transcript from an NPR conversation with the author of a biography about Walter, it was mentioned that his great-great-great grandmother fathered six(!) children with the slave owner, one William Henry Harrison.

When I saw that printed in the sentence, I said: wait---the President? And the sentence continued on stating that this Harrison was elected as the 9th President of the United States. One thing I learned on a bit of dive on him was that he was from the Virginia Harrisons (more on them in a minute) and he was the last US president born as a British subject in the Thirteen Colonies, having been born in 1773 on one of the Harrison plantations in Virginia.

One thing I did remember about William Henry Harrison was that he died within a month of being inaugurated. Exactly a month, it turned out, with inauguration day being March 4th, and his death coming on April 4th, 1841. Of what, you might ask? What felled this slave-raping Virginia Harrison? Salmonella. Yikes. The 1840s, man! 

The Virginia Harrisons were a prominent family back in Yorkshire that came to the New World to grow their fortunes, and not a persecuted religious group like you may find in the northern colonies. The Harrisons came in two waves, and ended up with two branches laying seeds in many places. Benjamin Harrison V was a corpulent slave owning Virginian plantation owner, descended from the Benjamin Harrison who made the journey from England in 1630. Benjamin Harrison the Vth, though, was both William Henry Harrison's grandfather, and one of the signees of the Declaration of Independence. He liked to lighten the tense mood by joking, since they all viewed that signing the Declaration was really just their own death warrant. He joked that his size would make his death from hanging fast, while the skinnier men would twist in the wind and struggle for hours to die. Hilarious. He also, generally, beefed with John Adams, whom he thought was too radical, while Adams thought the wealthy scion was too conservative and enjoyed a good time too often.

William Henry Harrison's own grandson, Benjamin Harrison, himself was elected President, as the middle part of the Grover Cleveland Sandwich. There have been other prominent members of this branch of the Virginia Harrisons, like the feminist activist Mary Stuart, and the surgeon of the first successful kidney transplant, John Hartwell Harrison.

A different branch, normally called the James River Harrisons, came over a few years after Benjamin Harrison, settled in a different spot (Shenandoah Valley) and sport, as descendants, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley. Holy hell!

The English Harrisons have a disputed history, as one claims they descended from Cnut the Viking settling in the 1300s, and another is less colorful if dating back further.

Anyway, I enjoyed the circular Americanism-irony of it all, like how Indian-killer John Parker had, as a descendant, Quanah Parker, an advocate at the federal level for all of the Southwest American tribal groups. And here we are again: slave-raping future president (who dies of salmonella poisoning) had, as a descendent, Walter White, a political and civil rights activist who worked up to the highest levels of government, trying to dismantle racism and segregation.

I should state: The Virginia Harrisons did divest their slave holdings after the Civil War, and President Benjamin Harrison was an abolitionist and has been remembered for his work to help franchise Black Americans.

Once I tried a thought experiment: did any non-royal father/son duo effect more lives than Admiral George and his son Jim Morrison, one the leader of the Navy during the Vietnam conflict and the other the frontman of the iconic band The Doors? These kinds of familial connections---the Parkers, the Harrisons, et al---make me want to maybe look a little deeper under the hood, so to speak, at the connections in America's history.