Where The “Black” Ends

I watched an episode [video] of the NBC program, Who Do You Think You Are, last week. As usual, it was fascinating to watch this exploration of American history as encapsulated through one man’s search for ancestry, even if that man is the famous Lionel Richie (Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah!)

I dropped in a few minutes in as Richie had identified his Great Grandfather who had married, at age 50, a 15-year-old girl only to get divorced about seven years later due to abandoning the now 22-year-old with child. This revelation didn’t sit too well with Lionel even after he’d been told this was the norm in the 1800s. Sigh. More on this …

Nevertheless, he continues the search into this particular man’s life and times. He discovers the guy, John Louis Brown, was a leader in a Tennessee fraternal organization known as the Knights of Wise Men. It seems this organization was an inchoate insurance company for black people, providing life insurance at a time when the recently-freed black people weren’t accepted in southern white society after Emancipation and the Civil War.

This part of the story seemed to sit better with Richie, especially when the consulting expert couched this organization in the magical terms of being an early Civil Rights organization. Suddenly the rake who’d married then abandoned a 15-year-old bride was recast as a leader in the black “community,” a most inauspicious role.

Sadly, Great Grandpa Brown seems to have come out a bit worse because in the end, the treasurer of the Knights of Wise Men turned out not to be so wise after all and made off with its treasury, effectively bankrupting the Knights and Brown. We find Great Grandpapa ending his life in an unidentified grave in the pauper’s section of the black cemetery he’d tended for a living toward the end.

One of the documents unearthed by the historians for the show pointed to the fact that Great Granddad may have been a slave owned by a man named Morgan Brown. In addition and rather shockingly, Great Granddads’ father is listed as Morgan W. Brown. Lionel’s happy feet stopped “dancing on the ceiling” by this bit of news, even though he “expected” something like it. Sigh.

Tracing back further, he finds that indeed Great Grandpapa Brown had started life as the slave son of a slave woman (wonderfully named Mariah) both belonging to a prominent TN doctor named Morgan Brown. In a diary entry, Dr. Brown recorded the birth to Mariah of a son named John. The historian assured us that this was highly unusual especially when it was also discovered that Dr. Brown decreed in his will, written sometime during Mariah’s pregnancy, that she and her son be freed upon his death. In addition, Dr. Brown stipulated that the baby boy be given an education, an anathema in pre-Emancipation America.

This Dr. Morgan Brown was the father of Morgan W. Brown and so either Brown (pere) was Richie’s Great Great Granddad or Brown (fils) was, and considering Brown (pere) was 80-years-old at the time, it was more likely that Brown (fils), 39 at the time, was the cock-on-the walk responsible.

So then, it turns out that Lionel Richie, mega-rich musician had slaves in his ancestry and that one of those ancestors was a white dude who’d impregnated a black slave woman. Not at all surprising of course, but here are some observations.

Lionel Richie obviously has white genes in his bloodline, looking at him. If you go back long enough in America as a black man, you will find slave ancestors. Black slave ancestors with white genes didn’t get them by laboratory experimentation as far as we know; “massa” and slave woman had some chickaboom chickaboom and out popped baby.

Further, the fact John Louis Brown’s mother was freed and that he was educated seems to point to a tender benevolence on the part of the slave holders or at least, to the absence of malevolence toward Mariah and John.

Knowing this, what surprises me is how Richie ends the ancestry search right there, where the “black” ends. It seems he’s simply not interested in knowing anything about Great Great Granddad and anyone else before in spite of the fact these men don’t fit the abusive slave owner role. “Why not,” seems a good question, one that only Richie can answer. But in my opinion, it’s rather ridiculous to stop your search for ancestors simply because the “black” ends.

The other observation I have is that of realizing just how uneducated modern (American) man is about history. It violates our modern sensibilities when we hear of men having children with 15-year-old girls and we reel from all the implications.

When the entire length of recorded human history is examined, such occurrences are indeed the norm. If an alien landed on earth to peruse and study our history as a race, he would deem our present-day society as an aberration vis-à-vis our past. We have been the way we are only for a very short time, and try as hard as we may, those drives  and attitudes don’t simply vanish from our gene pool.